I'm genuinely curious why you prefer a paperback, could you elaborate? Also, wanted to ask: have you tried the Kindle app on your Mac/PC and mobile device yet?
• I read books when I want to escape computers, the internet and the distractions they bring. That's part of what I love about them.
• I don't own an ebook reader or a tablet. I don't have any plans to purchase one. I have no desire to read a book on my phone, and the only books I read on my laptop are technical books with no real value as literature.
• I like physical collections of things. I've never bought an eBook, nor music, nor movies to be downloaded. I have hundreds of CDs and vinyl records and around a thousand paper books. Books aren't simply things to read, but a physical representation of my life's history: virtually everything I've been interested in in my life is displayed on my bookshelves.
• I can give a book away. I do that a lot. Two walls of my living room are covered in bookshelves. When I'm talking to someone and there's a book I think they should read, I give it to them. I've bought my favorite books half a dozen times, because I want to have them around to give away.
• I mostly read books away from home, in places that I don't want to whoop out an expensive device (because it makes it a target for theft, because I think it looks dorky) -- parks, the subway, cafés. This is connected to the first point -- I like getting away from the distractions of the internet and being somewhere where I can just read.
• I can throw books in my bag when I'm headed to places where there's a high propensity for me to lose or have my bag stolen. Catching the subway on the way to a concert? If I lose my book that's $10 down the tubes, not $100.
> I read books when I want to escape computers, the internet and the distractions they bring. That's part of what I love about them.
... the Kindle is actually fairly good on this count. Checking email on it is so clunky as to not be a temptation at all. It doesn't make noises or have alerts, and it has a very long batter life. So if you get into a book, the fact that you're reading it on a device does fade into the background, leaving you to concentrate on the content.
Like GP, I also buy, collect, give paper books, and have a wall of them in our living room, including all Balzac in a 18xx edition. But when I travel I take my Kindle instead of spending one hour pondering which book to take.
You still have all the same benefits you mentioned above, minus the ability to turn off distractions:
• You don't need to own an ebook reader or tablet. Amazon's Kindle App is free and works on practically anything: Mac, PC, iPhone, even a Chrome plugin if you don't like having a desktop app.
• You keep a physical collection in your reader just as you do a bookcase. It's not the exact same thing, but that's something I noticed recently: hardly anyone visits me at my apartment, but I am often going to meet people at cafes and with me I bring my laptop or phone, and on those I have my entire collection of books.
• You can loan a Kindle book to a friend on Amazon, and it's free.
• You can read on any device, and you almost always will have your cell phone with you. I usually do most of my reading on the BART or CalTrain, or waiting in lines.
• You don't need to carry a bag or remember any books, if you have a digital collection they're always with any of your devices. If your device is stolen, you still have your digital book collection.
Just because you don't invite people over to your place doesn't meant that I don't. In fact, I do, regularly.
Also, if you put the pieces together, the fact that you have a device around that you're comfortable reading on most of the time doesn't mean that I do. My phone is a terrible device for reading on (as is my laptop, honestly), and the only one that I have around as often as I have a book in my bag.
Giving someone a book has an emotional connotation that loaning someone something on an electronic service does not. That may change in future generations, but for me, and my ilk (most of whom also don't read books on electronic devices), giving someone a physical book means far more than loaning them something with an internet service.
I have no problem that in your social environment that Kindle books are superior to physical books. But you said that you can't understand why anyone else would prefer physical books, and it seems the simple explanation is that, well, everyone isn't you.
I'm not trying to sell anyone on it, I'm more interested in seeing if people switch back after they've tried it. That would be more interesting to me.
Whatever book I'm currently reading gets carried around with me quite a bit. It's thrown (and left) in the car, on my desk at work. It is not exceptionally well taken care of. It's just a cheap paperback, in most cases; losing it won't matter much. There's a kind of cognitive tax to carrying around something you don't want to lose or have to be careful with.
Besides, I can only read one book at a time, so the ability to access any book other than the one I'm currently reading doesn't offer much value.
But being locked into whatever devices Amazon decides to support and not having some of the freedom isn't ok with me.
There also seems to be no quality control on Kindle books. I'm now pretty much afraid to buy any book that doesn't offer a sample of the first few pages. I almost bought Dante's Inferno on Kindle because it was ~3x cheaper, but then I downloaded the sample. The print version of this book has the Italian on the left side pages and the English on the right side. They seem to have just run that version of it through some Kindle-ifier, meaning that there was one print-page worth of Italian, followed by one print-page worth of English, repeating. Just an awful experience.