Why digital natives prefer reading in print | Hacker News Reader

Why digital natives prefer reading in print

washingtonpost.com

81 pointssergeant3109 comments

Digital media are failing, especially eBooks are, and it to me it feels like a huge cultural regression.

In the nineties, I digitized my CD collection and haven't looked back. I did the same with my DVDs, and eventually I got (DRM-free or cracked) eBook versions of all books that were important to me. Doing away with all those physical storage objects felt so liberating, I can't even describe it. Plus, I can have all my stuff with me wherever I go. I do enjoy reading on my iPad, too.

However, nobody I know of made this leap. Usually, older people like me do have some sort of ripped movie or eBook collection which they don't use. Millennials, however, use physical media all the way, and even where they don't they accept only DRM'ed, thoroughly walled gardens where you can rent stuff for a limited time and those companies only allow you to consume things in a very restrictive manner. They have huge DVD collections, they started printing out their photos again, they mostly only read paper-based books, they prefer streaming content via crappy proprietary channels, and I'm not even sure many of them would know how to copy a file if their life depended on it.

This feels like an immense failure to me, not only because I feel isolated in my content consumption habits, but also because we've somehow managed to move backwards for purely cultural reasons. It's a loss of capability, and a loss of personal freedom and empowerment.

I think it boils down to the actual experience[1]. You don't interact with a CD much. You open the box, put the disc in the player, and then enjoy the actual content, same for movies. So CD, DVD, HDD or cloud doesn't take anything away.

Reading is different, you constantly touch it, smell it, look at the paper and ink. I still remember strongly the sensation I get when I used to read a little. Eebook readers (even the best) take away all this. The most compelling reason people enjoy e-readers: space. Especially for travelers or even holidays, you can carry as many books as you want in your bag now; something impossible before. Other than that I'd bet people prefer paper.

My conclusion to the digital era trend, is that it's a human sensation deprivation most of the time.

[1] there's a little movement toward vynil LP records too, the large cover art, setting up the player arm (also the acoustics)...

>Reading is different, you constantly touch it, smell it, look at the paper and ink.

Aside from looking at the ink, none of these things actually have to do with reading. They're all things that deal with paper. I've never seen them as important, though I understand that some people enjoy them. But so much that you cannot read without it? (Or at least so much that it makes reading significantly less enjoyable).

To me, that's like someone saying they like eating popcorn while watching movies, and that they could never watch a movie without popcorn. Do you really even enjoy the movies, or just the popcorn?

I also have a vinyl record collection. I really enjoy the ritual of setting a record on the turntable and playing it, studying the packaging and any inserts included while it plays. But 99% of my music listening is done through Spotify or Bandcamp.

eReaders have so many advantages aside from just space. I never lose my place, even when reading 5 books at once. I can highlight what I'm reading without worrying about it being harmful to the book. I can look up a word in a dictionary instantly, on the device (this ended up being a much nicer feature than I thought it would be). Being able to easily read with one hand. My library is entirely backed up online, so if I lose or break my device, I still keep my books (this isn't so true about the collection of books I left at an ex-girlfriend's house).

>I think it boils down to the actual experience

Certainly. It just surprises me how many people seem to enjoy the experience of reading more than the actual reading.

Ha, well, I edited my first comment too much, I said I believe that this is a fundamental trait of humans. We love the physical sensations. Typing on a mechanical keyboard, playing on a weighted-keys piano (instead of responsive synth.), touching paper. It becomes as important as the symbolic experience (the aesthetic pleasure of music, or ideas put in words). Medium and message blend into one.

In my unstudied and ill-informed opinion, computers and the internet have trained many of us to view intellectual content as more abstracted from the physical experience of ingesting it than it really is, as though the ideal of reading would actually be telepathy from writer to reader, and anything added to that signal chain must be by definition noise. I don't know if I totally buy that view though. I sympathize with the students who focus better with print; I do too - and I take better notes when I write by hand. I don't think that's because I'm anachronistic; I think it's because of some fundamental aspect of being both a mind and a body.

Exactly. We're more and more going away from analog, physical interactions directly to the symbolic / upper brain. But I deeply believe that the best path to symbolic abstraction is from real to ideal. Skipping the first seems an optimization but it's denying the machine on which the program runs, and is detrimental in the end. Unless you do advanced maths, then your brain is used to go directly to abstract ideas through highly compressed communication forms in signs.

eReaders have so many advantages aside from just space. I never lose my place, even when reading 5 books at once.

That one is really a mixed blessing. I also frequently have several books on the go at once, and have no difficulty in finding my place when I switch between them, even with long intervals. I enjoy a very good memory - but I think this is partly because of having to remember that information prior to the availability of digital text. I never liked using bookmarks and preferred remembering page numbers, and would often recall obscure details or sources by thinking back to where I was when I read them or some information about the book's physical context.

Some people see this as overhead; I see it as exercise that helps me stay mentally fit. It's important to me to be able to maintain a deep mental stack that can operate on conceptual, semantic, and associative levels as well as purely textual ones - searching for text is an extremely one-dimensional affair by comparison.

For me, the experience of reading drastically improves my take aways from the actual reading. I love my kindle, but actual paper books win every time (As long as I'm near my bookshelf). A lot of my time reading, is spent re-reading and eBooks haven't gotten that interface down yet. Sometimes I catch myself having zoned out 2, 3, 4 pages ago and being able to flip back and skim through to pick back up at the last part that I was fully cognizant of.

Sometimes I reach a point in the story that suddenly makes something that I read in chapter 3 or 4 much more important, it's way easier to leave one finger where I am and flip back to that pivotal moment (especially helpful if I had put the book down for a few weeks before picking it back up again).

Sometimes I'm having a conversation with my fiance later in the day or the week and something that I had read was really relevant to the conversation even if I didn't think that it was important enough at the time to highlight it. If I had read it in a physical book, I have an idea where it was physically and can usually find it in a couple of seconds by flipping through the pages. If I had read it on my kindle, then I just have to do a mediocre job of paraphrasing a beautiful turn of phrase.

>Aside from looking at the ink, none of these things actually have to do with reading..

Actually they do, comprehension and memorization are parts of reading. Events (like reading) that engage more senses engage us more deeply and enforce comprehension and memorization.

Don't see what the problem is. So millenials like to retain some connection to the physical world rather than glue themselves to the same old glowing screen all day for all activities, from work to reading to movies to music.

These things retain and comprise rituals, and rituals matter to human beings. Whether it's dedusting your DVD collection or swapping books with friends, reading a magazine in a park or cafe, etc.. netbooks, tablets, phablets have zero soul. Some go to extremes such as vinyl, most don't. Still.

Let tech figure out aviation, industrial goods production, logistics and what not. Software doesn't have to eat everything. It might technically be capable of doing so, but if younger consumers inadvertently decide to slightly delay the all-out zombification of the masses for another decade or until they get hooked on GoogleAppleMicroCorp's always-on SmartGlassVRContactLenses, I say good riddance.

>Millennials, however, use physical media all the way... They have huge DVD collections, they started printing out their photos again, they mostly only read paper-based books

What age are the Millennials that you know? Because I can assure you they are not typical Millennials

The parent and article author are describing a world that they would like to exist, not necessarily the one we inhabit.

> but also because we've somehow managed to move backwards for purely cultural reasons.

We didn't move backwards. What happened is that the expected benefits of online media didn't quite work out for most people in practice. Recognize that and optimizing for the state of media as it is rather than for acting now based on a romanticization of what online media could provide is sensible, and not a step backward.

Will online digital media become what those of us who were around when it was emerging hoped? Sure, probably, eventually. And, really, people rejecting it because it hasn't yet, and because current physical media still offers concrete advantages to people's desires compared to existing online media is the only thing that can create the pressure that will get it there.

Exactly, it looks backward for those who are excited by the digital trend (a fad to me), but reality will balance things out. Also things have value when rare, now that physical is heading to rare...

>they started printing out their photos again

You lost me here. I'm firmly a "millennial", and I can't recall ever seeing a friend with printed photos from the last four years other than the occasional art student. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overarching point, but this part really rings very hollow to me.

My family prints out pictures. We of course have hundreds of gigs of digital, but the pleasure of having physical books of curated sets of our most loved photos, e.g. of our vacations and kids, is way more powerful than staring at them on our TV or laptops. (&FWIW I'm right at the cusp of gens X and Y.)

That might be fine if you have lots of space in your house and don't plan to move any time soon, but I've kept everything digital because I don't have much space in my apartment and I might move within a year (when my lease is up). It's fantastic not having to deal with physical goods.

Every so often we'll print off a favorite picture or something. Maybe to make an invitation or a sign or something. We definitely don't treat them as well as a real photograph and they usually end up getting tossed in the trash after a short life tacked to a cork board.

Mainly, in some cases, printed books still have an edge in usability over e-books. Some of it is just due to current technical limitations: e-books often have bad enough typography that the reading experience is noticeably worse than with a printed book. Moving around the content is still more awkward with e-books than with printed ones. We also have adopted page numbers as reference markers and haven't yet gone back to numbering sentences or paragraphs in most instances.

There's also the issue that CDs or DVDs are useless without a playback device, while books are self-contained.

I have the opposite view for most of the items you've listed. I'm a millennial. I think that most of it boils down to two things: UX and sense of worth.

First, for UX, I find most e-formatted books to be terrible. Sure fiction is okay in such a format. It's linear. Start on page 1. Work through until end. Sadly, I don't read fiction (my wife gets on me for this). I read technical things. I read things that require a House of Pain level of Jumping Around. I get five pages into a a section then need to backtrack. E-books are terrible for this. It's because they suck on Kobo and other e-readers. The screens too small to hold the code information. Large screen e-readers for A4 style documents never really existed (in a reasonable price range) on an open platform. Many technical works are A4 PDFs. They don't work well on e-book readers.

I tried reading on two tables to get a better UX. The first was an HP flippy notebook. I read over 3,000 pages of IBM Red Books on Websphere Process Server and the old IBM MQ BPM whose name I'm forgetting. It wasn't terrible. A bit small because the resolution on the HP was lower than a modern laptop. However, it was 5-6 lbs. Crap was that tiring. So I got an iPad. Turns out that the resolution on that is too low for A4. Sure I can zoom. Sure I got GoodReader. Sure it was annoying when I tried to page through on a zoomed page. UX still sucks. Non-PDF tech books are better in iBook or the other readers available. I ran an experiment with Joy Of Clojure 2: The Clojuring. Not bad. Only worked inside. So I never got read at the beach (I moved to Florida to do that, amongst other reasons).

UX never worked for me. I hope for a day when an e-reader fits a full page of information comfortably in the screen with ability to quickly leaf back through pages without slow refresh rates. Until that day comes, physical, heavy books it is.

Second, I've come to the conclusion that I don't care for media. That isn't to say I don't use it. I do. Like crack. I sit on my sofa and do nothing but watch TV shows that I don't really care for, but it's easy enough to be motivated to just sit there. As a result, I don't pay for cable. I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime (Prime more for the shipping, but combined with the streaming, I get my money's worth). I don't buy DVDs any more. I don't watch the ones I have (except for once a year watching the Harry Potter movies over a weekend). I just don't care. So Netflix is fine with me. Control what they want, but the media companies wouldn't have made money off me if they were open.

Media has almost no value to me. If my wife wasn't around, I'd get rid of Netflix (keep Prime, shipping to a small Florida town makes life better). From what I can tell through anecdotal observations, media is on the wane for most millennials. We don't philosophically care. That's why we're fine to rent access. It's not an asset. It's not an investment. It's something to do to distract and we've got phones with the Internet and its Tumblr and Facebook and Rock'em-Sock'em-Robots.

I find most e-formatted books to be terrible

Several people have brought this up, and I think it's a great example of path-dependency and bad choices. I remember when CDs first became available and enterprising publishers were trying to think of what to do with all that space, so they made 'shovelware' CDs containing hundreds of shareware games or other commodifiable stuff - particulary the 'Project Gutenberg' collections of classic books in electronic form. Great! But when you'd open them up, they were a mess of line breaks, chapter headings (on every page), page numbers. Even today, the default UTF-8 text versions are still formatted for 80 character terminals or the dot-matrix pritners that preceded them.

The basic literary units (regardless of topic) are words, sentences, and paragraphs. Not lines. Even the most humble text editor has an inbuilt word-wrapping capability; there is no reason to add line breaks to a digital text. 'But,' some will argue, 'what about people who are in a terminal and trying to read something using 'more'?' Well, use a damn pipe. It's insanely stupid to digitize a text and then impose device-specific formatting on it. If something needs to be highly organized in the manner of a technical book, then mark it up properly with TeX or whatever. But if it's linear and doesn't depend on specific typography, then there's no reason to be baking any formatting in.

> I digitized my CD collection and haven't looked back

Your CDs were always digital.

There are a few major problems with this "research."

1. Asking what people "prefer" does not reflect what they actually use.

2. Textbooks are very different from the books most people read

3. College students are in a conspicuous time of life when physical books are more readily available than eBooks (and often free). That doesn't hold true for most of life.

> Digital media are failing, especially eBooks are

I'm not sure where you're getting your data, but I think all of these anecdotes are highly exaggerated.

Amazon began selling more E-Books than physical books back in 2011. [1]

To be fair, I, along with millenials prefer reading physical books. They're nicer on your eyes, you get to "feel" them -- print is a great medium.

But I now read exclusively on my iPad and eBook.

Why? When I want to read something I want to read it now, and I don't want to end up with a library of crap I have to move around.

Textbooks are particularly terrible in electronic formats. The formatting is never right, graphics are always messed up, code often has line breaks in weird places, etc. If I were still in college studying CS, of course I would get the physical copies. But I'm not, so I don't.

>They started printing out their photos again I don't want to counter anecdote with anecdote, but I can't find any empirical data on number of photos printed, so I'm forced to. I literally don't know anyone who has printed more than a dozen photos in the past couple years (with the rare "year in photos" photobook exception).

>They have huge DVD collections I have friends whose kids didn't know what a DVD is. Most people I know have some DVDs laying around, but I feel like you're vastly overstating the prominence of physical media.

I even ditched my vinyl record collection for Spotify - it didn't provide enough value to lug it around

I would guess I'm on the "early adopter" end of the spectrum (as well as a bit of a minimalist), but the notion of physical products that we own and lug around seems to be clearly on the way out, as not only electronic but "in the cloud" media take over.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_...

It's a loss of capability, and a loss of personal freedom and empowerment.

Wait, people's choice to prefer physical media is a loos of freedom and empowerment? That's a hard argument to make. It seems to me that you're arguing that the failure of others to share your consumption preferences means that there's insufficient market pressure to on suppliers to deliver content in a way that suits you.

I like the idea of e-books but in practice I loathe reading them. That's inconvenient, because we have a lot of books and I read fast, so moving house means dealing with several hundred pounds of printed matter and wrangling bookshelves. But the textural substrate of the physical book is far mroe appealing to me than any e-reader, not to mention being able to pencil notes on the margin or the creative pleasures of discovering epehemera of prior readers in used books, from personal ntoes to airline tickets. Likewise, DVD or blu-rays often deliver better viewing quality than streaming alternatives (although I use Netflix streaming regularly), and more importantly they often contain valuable extras - at least I find them valuable, because I work in film so things like interviews or director commentaries can have significant professional utility. Downside is having the wrangle the physical disks and annoying publisher lead-ins/piracy warnings and so on.

As for photos, I have thousands of digital ones as I shoot a lot, but ones I really like get printed and I also still shoot things on film because film grain color etc/ is so aesthetically pleasing. Film sets are generally digital these days, and that means shooting a bland, low-contrast image in order to maximize dynamic range and treat the footage with an appropriate 'look' in post. Economically this makes a great deal of sense and I love the possibilities it opens up, but I also enjoy shooting blind on junk cameras (even a hand cranked one) to see what I'll get. Digital is a great complement to working with or viewing physical media, but it need not and probably should not become a substitute. I have photos and artwork of mine hanging on the wall that I originated digitally, but I also enjoy brushes and paint; I do most of my writing at a keyboard but I carry notepaper and pencil everywhere because I enjoy writing things by hand, and because switching between different media is often a good way to escape creative blockages.

What's "backwards" or "forwards", and who are you to decide for the rest of us?

Look, I've tried many of these same things. Digitized all my CDs? Check. Start in on the movies? Check. Got a crap-ton of ebooks on my Kindle? Check.

But reading is simply not consuming bits displayed in e-ink on a hunk of plastic. Reading is removing yourself from distractions and committing to some kind of journey with your author. The devices that we consume e-books on are now all competing to get us to do all sorts of other bullshit that's got nothing to do with that. And that makes them a problem.

I'm keeping my V1 Kindle DX until it fails, and then unless I find another 1-function e-book device? I'm throwing the entire hunk of trash away. It doesn't matter if I have 5 or 5 thousand books on one device, if I don't get the same benefits from reading, it's not working for me.

For consumers, there is nothing wrong with one-function devices -- it's the manufacturers that all want a new walled garden where they can charge entry.

Digital media at this point in time is more or less volatile from a historical perspective. It's best to consider it transient and have physical copies of the most precious things.

Transient equals consumables - and companies leverage this.

I have a few photographs from my great-grandparents from late 19th or early 20th century. Which are awesome. With physical media I can be pretty sure I can preserve data over the next hundred years (sans accidents). With digital media one still needs heavy redundancy to guarantee preservation. Not to think about the historical compatibility issue. Which storage format will be readable then? It's much easier on an institutional, internet archive scale to set up an ongoing process. I'm a software engineer and figuring out how to keep my digital data alive is a constant PITA...

> Millennials, however, use physical media all the way... They have huge DVD collections

As a millenial, I have to say this statement could hardly be more misleading. Millenials I know may have DVD and even VHS collections, but that's only because these media are effectively "dead," so used items can be had for free or cheap via thrift stores. (Remember that we're young and (mostly) poor; these simple facts explain 99% of so-called "generational trends.")

Other physical media (viz., vinyl records) are typically kept around for nostalgia/display value. Someone who has a record on vinyl might listen to it more often as an MP3 or stream--but those things don't fulfill the universal human need to put all the stuff you like on a shelf.

> and even where they don't they accept only DRM'ed, thoroughly walled gardens where you can rent stuff for a limited time and those companies only allow you to consume things in a very restrictive manner.

Ah, so you're saying millenials don't use the kind of digital media that squares with your politics! Fascinating, tell me more. But this is the simplest thing in the world to explain: people don't actually want to own media. We want to (1) access it when we want to experience it, and (2) signal to others that we like it. Streaming solves the first problem easily and cheaply. Occasional physical purchases solve the second problem.

Regarding DRM'd streaming in particular, do you know how many hours of my life I sacrificed in the early 2000s hand-editing MP3 tags, copying files between devices, etc.? Neither do I, and I don't want to know because I'm sure it was obscenely high. I would gladly pay Google Play twice the $10/month I pay them so that I will never to have to return to those dark times. And I feel similarly about Netflix.

If for some reason my streaming services don't have a piece of media--or if I need something they do have in DRM-free form--I can torrent it or (vomit) purchase it from Amazon/iTunes. Honestly, it's a beautiful system--I get so much for so little. It feels like the exact opposite of a "loss of capability."

But this isn't an "I love Big Brother" moment. I accept the system only because I always have the option to pirate what I need. That's why I don't see DRM as the problem. DRM can never eliminate piracy due to the "analog hole." Law enforcement, the courts, and Big Content could do a lot more to crack down on it though. That's why, on the one hand, I really won't lift a finger to do anything about DRM, but on the other hand, I'd be willing to expend a lot of energy opposing any law that would further empower copyright owners. That's why I've donated to the Pirate Bay. Etc.

If you want to take the discussion in a more idealistic direction, I think reducing the copyright term to 15-20 years would be a much more important change than anything else I've discussed. And unlike anti-DRM activism, copyright term reform is something that almost anyone can understand and relate to.

> they mostly only read paper-based books

Did you RTFA? The whole thing is about why books are an exception. No one is concerned with "reading comprehension" when it comes to music or movies. Psychologists in TFA appear to be saying--and I agree--that our comprehension and retention of long-form printed material is facilitated in subtle ways by the physicality of books.

TL;DR if the system stays as open as it is today, I think digital media are clearly succeeding. In a context where Netflix is one option among several, it's a godsend. In a context where it's the only option, I think you have a better case--but we can prevent things from deteriorating to that point.

Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen. But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive. There are so many advantages to printed books that people ignore it's not even funny.

- No need for batteries.

- You can gift them.

- You can lend them.

- You can sell them.

- You can add sticky notes to bookmark and add notes without relying on some crappy software.

- No need for constant backups. Many books have been preserved for generations. People have trouble finding files from couple years ago.

- Format-agnostic. Remember about all the dead floppy drives and outdated formats, such as VHS and ZipDrive.)

- Great decoration, conversation starter and a kind of personal statement.

- As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find.

- Personally, I remember when and where I bought most of the physical books. Seeing them on a shelf serves as a great reminder. You are less likely to forget about physical book, than about a file. Before you proclaim this a silly point, take a look at your Steam/GOG "library". Do you even remember what's there? Do you remember how and when you bought it? Does it bring any contextual memories?

I can continue the list, just don't want to.

> - As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find.

This is the main reason I still use paper. While digital may be cheaper and more portable, print is so much easier in the eyes and I tend to read much faster than on a bright panel.

Have you tried an e-ink screen?

I haven't, but would to give it a shot in the future. I feel like it would be a hassle to convert books that aren't already ePub/(insert DRM format here) though. Do you find this to be a problem?

Calibre ereader management is any easy piece of software that makes those conversions a lot faster

Well, I had an old Sony PR-505 eReader and while it could read PDF's it ccertainly wasn't ideally suited to it. I did usually preprocess them by at least cropping the margins as much as I could (a program called briss makes this easy). But I think modern eReaders are much better and might be able to zoom in on PDFs.

Every other format I came across I converted to ePub using Calibre, which is fairly painless.

Agreed, and I'll add one more to the list: when reading for pleasure, I have the habit of going back and forth, sometimes going a few pages back to remember who was the character that said something. Sometimes when I continue reading a novel, I go back a few chapters and re-read a specific paragraph. I don't know exactly where it was, but I know it was "some pages back, in the middle of the page".

For some reason, doing this with an actual book is a lot faster than with an ebook. Partly this is because of the slow screen refresh in my 2nd gen Kindle, which makes repeatedly changing pages a pain, but mostly it is because "random access" for a print book is way faster than for an ebook.

The only ebook feature that beats a print book is searching for a specific word or sentence that you remember verbatim, but I seldom remember things verbatim...

They also can't be remotely stolen from you like when proprietary reading devices wiped ebooks for various copyright changes, and the print edition can't be quietly changed. Print requires errata or apologies from newspapers about corrections but ninja editing is too easy with digital.

The short version is that physical books have a much better user interface than electronic books by almost every criterion. Part of this is because of counterproductive DRM restrictions, but software and hardware limitations ensure that many uses of books, especially textbooks, fall far short in any electronic format.

We take for granted, or are just unaware of, many of the ways in which physical interaction with objects adds to the human experience of using them. Sense memory/muscle memory/spatial memory can all play a role in absorbing the content of the book, as can the physical interaction required to turn pages. For reference work, things like tabbed pages or over-printed index points or even just the ability to flip through the book or a section of the book at a glance has no equal in electronic form.

This for sure! I like that I can flip to the table of contents to look at something or to the back for the index and not lose my place. They're doing pretty well at attempting to approximate that but it still feels like I'm leaving something that will be difficult to find later. Especially with some of the crappier reading apps on mobile.

I'm a huge fan of the Kindle for your typical linear fiction. It has many advantages over a stack of paperbacks.

For any other kind of book, e-readers are an unsolved problem in terms of both hardware and especially software. I'm convinced that it's possible to make some really excellent textbook-oriented software (for a large-ish tablet device), but it certainly doesn't exist yet.

I vastly prefer ebooks for pleasure reading. I read them on my phone (white text on black background with the brightness waaaay down). It's great because I can read anywhere - in many places that I normally couldn't, because 1) I always have the book with me, 2) I only need one hand (in fact even that only occasionally since you can set the 'book' down without having to go to great lengths to keep it open), and 3) I can read in the dark without disturbing my wife.

That said, I would never want to try to study from an e-textbook. All reference books I still buy in print. You would think with their searchability, ebooks would have an advantage there, but I've always just found it too awkward trying to jump between sections. It's much easier to have a mental model of where information resides in a physical book than a digital one.

What app do you use to read the books?

I use the Kindle app, but more due to inertia than anything else.

I also have some fiction ebook on my phone ready. It's big advantage is that it always with me. Statistics tell me I have read 35 books in 163 hours so far. Never tried reading non-fiction.

Reader App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flyersoft....

Lovely. Just a few points:

- Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete

- As children I almost broke my back, because I had to carry 10 kg of books every day. Even today I still walk funny.

- In Ireland some schools banned wheeled school bags because of some school uniform nonsense.

- It is impossible to buy some digital books. You can only rent some DRM nonsense. If you want to use book for decade or longer, you must buy print

- in many professions textbooks are major (sometimes only) study cost. Good gatekeepers to keep poor out.

- for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US.

> - Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete

Many of my books would suck in ebook form, no matter how big the screen is. Color, predictable layout so text, meta-text, and diagrams/images can be laid out sensibly and helpfully, and having two pages visible at a time are important for some books.

A good 14" e-ink screen won't make books obsolete. It'll take some much larger advances in technology and in standards (ha ha, good luck) for ebook readers to match paper books.

PDF?

Doesn't solve the lack of colour in textbooks (graphs, diagrams, photos, etc).

For most of the history of textbooks there was no color or only spot color for a bit of design flair. It isn't absolutely necessary to impart knowledge in most cases.

Also, I can (and often do) have pages open in each of my physical books simultaneously, so I can have a half-dozen on my desk at once and transfer my attention between them almost instantly. Compare that to a single 14" e-ink screen.

My eReader is a fantastic replacement for a stack of novels; books I will read from cover to cover, and won't want to mark up or use as a reference. It is a terrible replacement for a stack of textbooks in which much of the functionality comes from the ease of marking up, adding sticky tabs and most importantly having them all open at once in my field of vision.

Typesetting differences between different devices is a problem that needs to be solved for e-books to become feasible in classroom settings, book club settings, etc. If a group wants to discuss a particular scene, argument, metaphor, etc., it's important to be able to point to a page number -- ebooks make this tricky.

The typesetting problem also ties into the navigation problem. There are some books in my area of study that I make use of with great frequency (e.g. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Wittgenstein's Tractatus). For the most part, if you ask me to jump to a section, I can get there (within a dozen pages or so) just by opening up the book to the right location. The TOC in something like Adobe Reader do this effectively, but I haven't seen an e-reader that makes jumping to sections as quick.

Annotation is another tough problem. In one particular copy of Plato's Meno, I have a series of diagrams attempting to work out a geometry problem posed in a somewhat controversial passage [1]. Some e-readers have made advancements with text annotations, but nothing I've gotten my hands on comes close to paper (yet).

I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I agree with 'ashark that a 14" e-ink screen won't suffice to make books obsolete until certain problems are solved.

Even then, I enjoy having a large bookshelf packed with books. Call me old fashioned, but I love the smell of old books :)

[1] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821...

You're old fashioned. I used to write book reviews, and for a couple of years I literally got boxes of books from publishers every week.

After a while it got insane. The local charity shops and libraries hated me on sight.

Schools wouldn't touch the leftovers. I still have no idea why.

I kept a few thousand for the house, and the rest ended up in the wood burner.

Ebooks would have been much more practical.

The flip side of paper is the way that entire forests are laid waste. A print run of a million - not unusual for a best seller - will clear cut a huge area.

Then the pulp has to be bleached, which is a nasty process.

Eventually most of that paper simply gets thrown away.

The whole process is incredibly, stupidly wasteful.

I won't deny that I'm old-fashioned :)

The environmental impact of paper vs e-books is something I had not considered, but the effects of producing e-readers is still non-zero. I'd believe someone if they told me the impact was less than paper books though.

I'll also admit that e-books are more practical in some contexts. For instance, I prefer taking my kindle out for casual reading on the beach or in the park -- navigating the book, annotating, etc, aren't big issues for pleasure reading.

In academia, there is also another advantage to e-books: an e-book never really goes out of print. In my second year of college, I had to order an expensive copy of Gaston Bachelard's La formation de l'esprit scientifique from the UK because it was out of print in the US.

I look forward to a day when e-book annotation will suffice.

Large, low cost, lightweight, flexible e-ink-like screens so that the average person can have many of them, with different books in each, and the same kind of usage patterns as with multiple physical books in use at once, might. (As long as DRM isn't used to put restrictions in place that make that useless for people who aren't actively working around it.)

And there is active research in all the relevant technical directions. Maybe not in the next couple decades, but we'll get there with the technology.

> for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US

It's legal. Publishers don't like it, but it went to the Supreme Court and they decided in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc in 2013 that the First Sale Doctrine applies.

AbeBooks.com and Biblio.com are good sites for shopping for such books. They generally both have listings from both sellers in India and China and other countries where the publishers sell their inexpensive international editions, and from US booksellers who have imported the international editions.

Buying direct from an Indian seller is usually cheaper for the book, but much more for the shipping. The USA sellers are more expensive for the book, less for the shipping. It usually ends up about the same total either way.

I replaced my 30 year old, falling apart, copy of Apostol's "Calculus", which goes for around $200 per volume for the US edition, for around $25 per volume (including shipping) by getting the international edition, which is identical except it is paperback instead of hardback. It's kind of funny, because that is pretty close to what I originally paid for the books in 1977. (The content is the same as in 1977, too. Apostol wrote the books, got feedback for a few years, made a second edition in 1967, and stopped. The books are still used in a few top STEM schools, and students using them in 2015 get the exact same text I had in 1977).

I'm going to focus on textbook (because it makes my point easier). To me there are three distinct issues with digital books:

- Backlit displays give you eye strain and make reading less pleasant. This can be solved with eInk but then you lose colour diagrams/graphs and even the largest eInk device is smaller than a single textbook page (and the layout within textbooks is key to understanding in some cases).

- Saving multiple pages is very painful. Almost all ebook readers (both apps and devices) allow you to save your current page, close the "book," and then continue later. Very few allow you to tag multiple pages with "sticky notes" and then jump back to any of them.

- Some people like to highlight their $100 textbooks or to write notes on the pages. I am not one of these people, however that is a legitimate argument against buying the digital book. You rarely can do this type of thing.

Unfortunately eInk was here to save us, and I think as a technology it hasn't really succeeded. It gained popularity for a brief period, but then the iPad got popular and people just decided to read on the device they already own (and then give up, and buy paper copies because it was so unpleasant).

So unless someone invents an RGB eInk device, I think we'll be stuck with either paper books or terrible backlit flicky displays forever. Too bad if you ask me.

Hm, I'm going to guess that the Kindle is probably the most popular e-reader, and it has the ability to add notes, highlights and bookmarks, both with the hardware device and in the apps for tablets and computers. It also doesn't have the eye strain issue.

Actual remaining issues:

* complex layouts get messed up, as you mention

* it's not very easy to leaf through an ebook and to quickly jump from section to section

That said, I still read 90% of my course materials on my Kindle, Kindle app for OS X or Mendeley. For all its disadvantages, having a digital overview of all of your annotations is a godsend when doing research or studying for an exam.

For that same reason, I don't take paper notes anymore: while convenient, often they get lost, you can't search through them and you can't edit them.

> it's not very easy to leaf through an ebook and to quickly jump from section to section

This is available on Kindle for quite some time now. Tap on top to show menu and then slide you finder on bottom bar - preview of pages will show and you can look back and forth without changing your current position.

It's an improvement, but not nearly as easy to use as leafing through a physical book. I'm thinking of the use-case where you're solving exercises in one place but also want to sometimes go back to the theory or to a reference section in the back.

This is probably as easily solved by just having multiple ereaders, honestly.

Have an ereader for every book! It's flawless!

Within reason, it probably is cheaper and more workable for many people to just have two or three ebook readers than the myriad of physical books and shelving necessary for them.

Additionally, for textbook style things, it was already common to have "student handbooks" that go along with the book.

>Backlit displays give you eye strain

Switching to a black background with white or gray text has pretty much eliminated this for me. Especially if you read at night or at least have auto-brightness enabled. The problem I'm seeing is that we're treating digital devices as paper books. We use a bright white background which is shooting a lot of photos into our eyes and wondering why its an uncomfortable experience.

I just don't think we've figured out the best way to make this stuff work. I doubt emulating books is the wisest choice here. I also don't see eink as our savior. The text always looked grainy and unfocused to me and the loss of color is inexcusable.

Do you use an OLED screen by any chance? A lot of Android phones have these, including some of the Samsung Galaxy phones. In OLED, the black pixels actually emit no light. With LCD, black pixels are just colored black, but the backlight is still emitting light.

The reason I ask is because in the case of white-on-black with OLED, there actually is significantly less light coming out. With LCD, it's really only the appearance of less light (obviously that's simplified, there are ways to make LCD panels emit less light when it's showing black).

  With LCD, it's really only the appearance of less light (obviously that's simplified, there are ways to make LCD panels emit less light when it's showing black)

Whoa, hold on there. It’s not “the appearance of less light” - it is less light because the backlight is being occluded by the LCD subpixels. The subpixels aren’t perfect at blocking the light, thus the varying grays of LCD blacks versus the pure blacks of OLED, but a black LCD screen is most assuredly emitting (if not producing) less light than a white one.

Man you even quoted the part where I said "obviously that's simplified". Black OLED pixels emit no light. Black LCD pixels emit > 0 light.

> Backlit displays give you eye strain and make reading less pleasant

This claim is certainly common, but what is the actual mechanism for a backlit display inducing more eyestrain than e-Ink? I think it has more to do with screen brightness relative to environment more than screen technology.

I digitalized all my book collection long, long time ago, and DRM FREE ebooks are much better than anything on paper.

Unfortunately there is no legal software solution that reaps the benefit of digital, because what makes digital great, like an open interface to access the data, makes it easier to copy.

Reading on a 55 inches OLED in portrait mode, with black background, letters in green or white is gorgeous. I can search the book, make it to talk me,read on multiple columns like a newspaper, read different books at the same time(in order to reference one from another) or have an open browser.

But for using digital you have to stop trying to emulate paper.

I'm amazed the publishing industry has managed to completely ignore the lessons of the music industry. In the meantime, piracy gets you a version that does it right.

It's pretty obvious... reading books digitally is a lousy experience. IMO, the only people who benefit from e-books are the people publishing them, except for reference books.

The textbook cost problem is about the implicit corruption of the process promulgated by publishers and colleges.

My nephew has the 45th edition of some Accounting 101 textbook, which is almost exactly the same as the 20th edition that I had a long time ago. It costs like $150, which is criminal. This situation exists because everyone is getting their pound of flesh from the poor students.

I will agree for some books, mainly those for which the publisher has skimped and not made the effort to get the formatting right, have an active TOC, etc. But in general I don't agree. I am a huge reader with a very large library. I still love my physical books but for most of my reading I made the switch to a Kindle years ago and have never looked back. The advantages in convenience of purchase and access greatly outweigh formatting issues, imo.

It exists for one reason and one reason only:

Because the professors, department, and college cause it to happen. They choose to assign a $150 textbook instead of picking something else, they choose to likely get kickbacks from the publisher (e.g. free lesson materials, free teachers edition, free grading, etc) and they choose to ignore their duty as guardians to educational access. They're sellouts.

Publishers and authors are designed to make as much money as possible. It is their legal and moral imperative. It isn't even the publisher who forced you to buy that $150 textbook, they didn't assign it, they didn't fail to include it in tuition, they just sold it in the open market.

I want John Oliver to do a bit on this topic. However as long as people continue to blame the publishers it will never get fixed. If people started [correctly] blaming the schools/professors/departments/etc and actually started to complain in that direction, things would change for the positive.

Think about who actually forced you to buy that book, and that is the answer for who you should be mad at. I'd honestly like to see legislation that forced public colleges and universities to include all books in the tuition, that way students can compare the relative cost because two classes (e.g. one assigning $150 books, and one assigning $50 books).

Sometimes the schools' hands are tied. The publishers use planned obsolescence to force the newer editions on students. If you can't buy new copies of older, cheaper books then there is no alternative but the shiny new wallet gougers.

> Sometimes the schools' hands are tied.

You haven't explained a scenario when that is the case. I will fully admit that sometimes individual professor's hands are tied (by the department, school, or college) but I won't conceded a school cannot find an alternative if they had any desire to.

Has anyone tried to make it easy for teachers/others to create and sell their own digital textbooks? That may be a solution.

For some classes there are "open source" (free) textbooks which they could be using. These are readily used in Europe and India.

They just choose not to because the publishers are literally helping professors with lesson plans and grading in some cases.

> Because the professors, department, and college cause it to happen. They choose to assign a $150 textbook instead of picking something else, they choose to likely get kickbacks from the publisher (e.g. free lesson materials, free teachers edition, free grading, etc) and they choose to ignore their duty as guardians to educational access. They're sellouts.

I'm offended ... I'm still waiting for my kickback from the publishers for the books I choose for my classes ... anyhow ...

If I choose that expensive textbook for my class, it's probably because I think you need the book even outside of my class.

Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest--"Introduction to Algorithms" is about $100. Yes, it's expensive, but it's an important book for your professional reference. A programmer better have a copy of that on the bookshelf.

And before you get too huffy about your lecturers, you might want to consider that anyone lecturing in your class who isn't full-time, tenure tack is probably getting about $5,000 for one class for the semester (I know this to be true for UCal system and Stanford). Given the amount of time it takes to teach, working at McDonald's probably pays better.

Back in the 90s, a big controversy on my campus was the Barnes and Noble takeover of the school bookstore, which had previously been run by the university's auxiliary services (3 old ladies + work/study students). Part of the deal was something like $5 million annual pledge to the university's struggling athletic program. (Ie. The kickback)

In other cases, the corruption was more blatant... Like the department where all books were authored by professors in the department.

In my example, I used the accounting textbooks as an egregious example, because accounting 101 is pretty cut and dry, and a professor time traveling from 1980 could teach it today. Engineering is a little different, and the textbooks tend to be more niche and have more lasting value. There's a difference between a technical reference and s $75 "Mercury Reader" that may largely consist of public domain works.

Books provide a great tactile experience. Books are immediate. But the real difference? Books make you slow down.

This is a great example of "The Medium is the Message". The words are the same, the information is the same, but the experience is completely different.

There's just something about screens. I think we're already seeing a trend among people who spend a lot of time around screens: we're starting to try to find ways to spend less time around screens.

It's not just the distractions -- the alerts, the temptations to switch over to a web browser. Though, certainly that's part of it. No, I think it's more about the medium itself. Just something about screens that's an entirely different experience.

Not saying screens are bad -- I love screens :) But, I think we're seeing a desire to find balance via slower mediums. For me it's cooking, reading, bicycling, etc.

Interesting! Hadn't thought about the psychology of it all, but it rings true for me: when I'm reading a book, I seldom put it down every few minutes, like I do when reading the same book on a screen.

Meh, wait until they have to move house a couple of times, or their kid wants a piano so they go from a nine foot library bookcase to a couple of Billys from Ikea.

Anyone who is worried about not 'owning' their books is more than welcome to accompany me on my biannual trip to the Friends of the Library donation desk. I guess I lose the tax credit on my ebooks, but at least I've gotten to keep them so far.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I moved to Kindle a year ago and haven't looked back.

For technical and art books, yes I'll still buy the paper version. But for non-fiction, fiction, saved long-form articles, and magazines... I'll take Kindle any day of the week. The ability to bring countless sources of content with me anywhere I go or at my bedside while saving incredible amounts of space in my house is a godsend.

I'm a designer, but perfect layout and typography of printed layout is far less important to me than the ease of consuming the content itself.

And it's not like the majority of books people own are that great as physical objects anyway- grab a random hardback from the fifties and compare it to any hardback you're likely to grab at Costco or B&N- the quality isn't even close.

This doesn't say anything about the actual e-books themselves, which are frequently terrible. Not only that, they're often priced at parity with the physical books, which takes some real gall.

I really do mean they're terrible, publishers would never release the print equivalent of the crap they put in e-books. Terrible typesetting, breaking important parts of books, no ability to handle things like accented characters, it's embarrassing stuff. Or, it should be, but publishers are so focused on not being subsumed by the onslaught of technology that it seems to be a low priority.

It seems like people constantly overlook the differences between reading textbooks versus reading novels. When reading for academic purposes (including novels for say English majors), the pattern of reading is often non-linear. People may read through it once or more times, but the majority of the time is spent skipping around, constantly flipping back and forth trying to find the relevant passages for reference. Personally, this type of reading is a very visual experience for me, I remember where a certain equation or figure was on the page and can quickly flip to it even if I don't remember the exact contents. Something that is not possible in the same way digitally.

On the other hand, I would guess that when most people read novels recreationally, they are reading in a linear fashion. There is a much smaller need for readers to constantly be flipping to different sections of the book while reading a novel.

There is also the issue of where people read. For textbooks, it is pretty easy to set a large book down on a table or desk at home, in a dorm room, or in a library. It is much harder to do so if you read primarily on a train or bus during rush hour or at a bus stop.

Maybe people overlook the differences because few people actually do both kinds of reading?

I, for one, prefer a e-book to a hard to navigate book.

* And I presume I'm a "digital native" (whatever that means) since I'm 13.

Not a proper digital native (I'm 37), but still I prefer reading on my laptop, tablet, or even phone.

I've been reading tons of books since I was 6. Switched to digital 10 years ago, more or less.

Only thing I can't absolutely think of reading other than in print, are mangas.

For fiction or for non-fiction?

And if non-fiction is it still more of a narrative (like a history text or biography) or is it a technical text which bounces around more?

If it's a technical text that bounces around, there's hardly any easier tool for navigating a math or science text than flipping through the pages until a diagram or formula that matches something like what you're looking for pops up. The cool thing is, the human visual system is good enough you can spend a fraction of a second on each page flipping through it like a flip book. You'll realize you passed it about 20 pages too late, so you repeat the search a little slower over the most recent pages until you find what you wanted.

On a computer with a PDF you may be able to do this, but no e-reader flips through pages this quickly, and most tablets start choking when you flip through hard to render texts too quickly.

And this doesn't even count the ability to markup a textbook, or slip loose sheets of paper in with your notes. My physics and calculus texts in college ended up being about 80% textbook and 20% engineering paper by the end of the semester. Annotations on e-books are certainly possible, but the UI is far more cumbersome than just a pen in hand.

For me technical text is the exact place where e-books are preferable. I can easily add bookmarks and swap around places and Ctrl+F phrases.

I read on my phone. It has a 5.2" display at better than 400dpi. I can read in the dark, in daylight, and I can do it one-handed while standing up on a bus or train. When I'm only reading on it, I get about 8 hours of battery life.

I read about 200 books a year on my phone. I prefer it...

except for comic books, technical books, and art books. In those, the layout or the physical format requires something much bigger, and still 300dpi or higher. That's very expensive right now.

Sent to my Kindle (via Pocket->custom Calibri script->Kindle email) to read later.

Hmmm, I usually just use "Send to Kindle" (by Klip.me) for web pages. Though I do use Calibre->Kindle email to handle books not in the Kindle ecosystem.

I didn't see mention of the thing that always bothered me most: eye strain. I'm not sure if this is still an issue with newer "Retina"-style displays, but if I recall correctly, the human eye will constantly try and refocus on individual pixels while reading online. This comes across to the reader initially as distractedness, and after prolonged periods, eye strain.

That is not at all an issue with an eink display. It's almost exactly like paper.

I think there is a distinction between textbooks and literature. Reading the average novel on a Kindle or tablet is not hard or distracting... Reading a Statistics textbook is darn near impossible. This article spends a lot of time focusing on college students and textbooks/required reading.

Myself I am in between. I read primarily on a Kindle. However if I am trying to find quotes, or additional subject matter, I go to the net for a quick search resulting in many resources. When it comes to magazines I still keep them around and use them more than the many complimentary electronic versions that are offered as I default back to open searches using google/bing over the online magazine.

I guess where I am going is, for mostly static information a book and magazine are great but for immediate need the power of search engines trumps all including many electronic versions of books and magazines which don't offer the same ease of use

I have the exact opposite experience. I love my Kindle paperwhite.

I can now get books right when I'm excited about them, not a few days later.

I can take a pile of books with me everywhere I go and read them when I have some spare time. Public transport and traveling are the common ones.

I'm also quite sick of carting around the physical books I've already collected every time I move.

I will admit to being disappointed by lending facilities in my kindle, but it's a minor quibble in my eyes.

I feel a little sorry for bookstores, which I really enjoy browsing, but I'd buy ebooks from them if I could.

Penny Arcade has a good pitch: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/03/09/

> school systems are buying millions of tablets and laptops for classroom use

Taking notes on a laptop has been found to be ineffective compared to writing: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-...

This is why laptops in classrooms is utterly retarded.

> utterly retarded

Do you really think it is appropriate to be using the term "retarded" as a derogatory term in 2015? Why not just bring out "gay" and the n- word too if while you're at it...

I actually agree with you regarding laptops and tablets in the classroom (and I work in technology). I just find such language pretty distracting to an otherwise great point and interesting link.

Ah, political correctness...

Ah, poor vocabulary...

English has a bunch of words meaning "stupid" or "foolish." For example: absurd, asinine, brainless, cockamamy, crazy, daffy, daft, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, dippy, doltish, dopey, dotty, dull, dumb, dummy, fantastic, fatuous, feebleminded, foolish, futile, gullible, half-baked, half-witted, harebrained, idiotic, ill-advised, ill-considered, imbecilic, imprudent, inane, incautious, indiscreet, injudicious, insane, insensate, irrational, irrelevant, jerky, kooky, laughable, loony, loser, ludicrous, lunatic, mad, meaningless, mindless, moronic, naive, nerdy, nonsensical, nutty, obtuse, pointless, preposterous, puerile, rash, ridiculous, senseless, short-sighted, shortsighted, silly, simple, simpleminded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied, stupid, thick, thick-headed, trivial, unintelligent, unreasonable, unthinking, unwise, wacky, weak, witless, zany

And several of those were formerly clinical descriptions of "mental retardation" -- "idiot" and "imbecile" for two -- exactly the same as "retard". The only difference is that they're further back on the euphemism treadmill.

You can argue against the use of certain words if you'd like, but you can't pretend that it's anything other than political correctness.

It shows a lack of professionalism, a poor vocabulary, and a general disrespect towards the mentally handicapped. It just isn't up to the standards that people expect in this day and age.

You seem to think "political correctness" is some kind of dirty term, rather than just accepting that times change, and society has moved on. Homosexuals are no longer seen as a negative (per "gay" as a derogatory) and the mentally handicapped are no longer seen as being idiots or fools (per "retard" as a derogatory).

It surprises me that some people simply do not appreciate this and how their use of language reflects on them as people.

/me tips his fedora.

Poor vocabulary, most probably, not being a native speaker. But I wanted to emphasize the fact that it was not just a stupid decision, but a well-documented stupid decision. It takes few minutes on google to learn that it is detrimental to learning (with scientific facts), and if everybody can do stupid mistakes, I call insisting on doing documented mistakes being "retarded". And no, I did not intend to attack handicapped people, this is just plain ridiculous. But you may have a better, more suitable adjective for that.

Tyranny with manners.

90% of the time you can replace "political correctness" with "politeness"... including this case.

Just having fun with the title. Why are digital natives preferring non digital for reading? Because there are no true digital natives, yet. At best we are all digital immigrants.

The article has a false premise.

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