[suifbwish]

Electronic books are also not our future. Until there are ebooks with physical pages I can turn, I can’t be bothered with them and I am not alone. Ebooks will never be mainstream except for audio purposes and for reference material.

[yardie]

That sounds nice if not a bit anachronistic. But as a child that had to carry 20lbs+ of books to school everyday I would have loved to have had a Kindle, a notepad, and some pencils as my daily load-out.

You with your immense home library of walls full of books can continue to do you.

[zaphod12]

You aren't alone, but you are also incorrect. Ebooks are already very mainstream. Doesn't mean physical books are dead - over time sales of physical books have gone down and sales of ebooks have risen. (though this has been relatively steady of late - ebooks make up 20% of sales)

fwiw, I hate ebooks for references because flipping around is pretty tough - but as someone who loves to travel and loves to read, being able to bring a single ebook reader has been life changing.

[suifbwish]

Don’t get me wrong I make it a point to collect as many ebooks as I can but I never read them. I feel through them now and then with some regex but I would never stare at a screen for hours just reading. Paper is softer on the eyes and it doesn’t take fossil fuel for them to continue existence and use. Until renewable energy makes up more than 50% of our energy sources, I hold that paper books are more environmentally friendly than ebooks as they do not require electricity to use or to store, additionally they permanently trap carbon in a useful way. Everyone is itching for everything to be “smart” but we don’t necessarily gain a benefit of making everything electronic

[andrewzah]

> Ebooks will never be mainstream

Sorry, but I really doubt this. Ebooks take zero space, are instantly shareable, and are somewhat* easy to search.

I hate reading on regular phone/laptop screens, but my kindle paperwhite is actually pretty nice for regular text. I like my bookshelf, but not accruing hundreds of pounds in books is also very nice.

We'll likely continue to see updates to e-ink/similar screens that make them more palatable.

* Actually for referencing material, I find physical books + bookmarks/tabstops are way easier than navigating stupid UIs. When I was learning Rust I had several sections of O'Reilly's Programming Rust bookmarked for quick reference. At least for separate software like amazon's app, etc. With a PDF indexer/parsing tool like Paperless searching is pretty painless, but you need to set it up and convert everything to an indexable format like pdf. Unless I'm doing something wrong.