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Comment by iamacyborg | Hacker News Reader

Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.

I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.

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Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital

A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.

It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.

It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through.

Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.

While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it. I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.

My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.

Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.

I classify skimming as a "distracting" activity. I always ask myself: What information do I need? And then it's very easy to get to the relevant passage. And outlines are there for a reason (PDF Expert can edit them) so navigating between the same file is not that cumbersome for me. I do agree that the experience is more pleasant with a paper book, but in a focused session, the result is pretty much the same.

Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.

That's a software choice issue. You can definitely flip through digital texts more easily than physical. With a decent monitor, you can flip through multiple books at the same time which is quite difficult to do with physical books, assuming you haven't summoned eldritch appendages to help.

> Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.

Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.

I prefer PDFs for informative material (various documentation), though they're less useful if it's just a photocopied old manual (no OCR).

It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.

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