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Comment by szmarczak | Hacker News Reader

> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids

Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.

The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.

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I have personally found it is often easier to find things in a physical book. Say I want to look up an equation that I remember learning about from a particular book.

If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation.

I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot.

With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book.

I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.

It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.

See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading.

Lots to think about there.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...

remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)

Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)

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