[salawat]

I print standard library docs all the time to read.

That includes building Table of contents/indexes.

I print out pages of source code to do physical cross ref of when I get in some really gnarly code to help me physically reckon through the abstraction spaghetti.

I print invoices, letters, diagrams, books, pamphlets.

I mean, just because you don't do documents or have anything you want on paper, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't.

[jemmyw]

That's crazy. You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?

I've never owned a printer, they're Satan's own gift to the consumer electronics market.

Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.

[yamtaddle]

> You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?

It's not about the text being "real", it's about the UI of printed pages versus screens. You can use the space around you, and leverage spatial reasoning, better with paper. You'd need multiple really big, digital-pen-input-ready, high-res screens, plus some very nice specialized software, to come close to the same experience with computers—and still only kinda, for some situations but not others. Or you can just print a few sheets of paper at pennies per sheet and have a couple pens and highlighters around.

Physical paper is just another UI, and remains better for some things than screens are. Screens do have some advantages—you can't full-text-search the sheets of paper you have splayed over your desk or pinned up on the whiteboard or tackboard, of course, though given how good & fast OCR is getting, we might be able to do exactly that when AR eventually takes off. You can't have animations on a piece of paper. You can't back your paper up in the cloud. But you can also have ten pages visible all at once, with paper, and recall "I think that one part was somewhere to the top-left...". You can fold it. You can doodle on it. You can stuff it between relevant pages in a book. You can bundle related pages together with consistent ordering in a UI I that's quite nice for many purposes (AKA a binder). Put all those together and there are plenty of times printed pages beat screens (though, to emphasize again just to make this entirely clear, not always).

> Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.

From my perspective e-readers have exactly two killer features: space/weight savings (this one is, to be fair, a huge advantage, and is the only reason I have one), and not needing separate "large print" editions for readers with poor eyesight. The UI of paper books is, in practically every other way, better. Two pages visible at a time is great. Being able to easily hold open a couple different parts of the book at once is great. Full-text search is occasionally nice but a good index is, overall, better (to be fair, being an ebook doesn't rule out having a good index, but I find them far more awkward to use than in physical books). Commentary and notes and annotations and anything that leverages the fixed, physical space of the page, including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry) are all better in a real book. Endless customization is obviously nice in a lot of ways, but the flexibility of ebooks harm some use cases—it's no coincidence that a lot of non-fiction struggles with representation in e-book form, without resorting to fixed-size PDF.

IMO ebooks aren't a book replacement, they're a totally new format, and creating content that best suits them won't be identical to creating content that best suits books, and books that are simply format-shifted to ebooks are bound (ha, ha) to suffer in some ways for it. The most apt comparison I can think of is the transition from scrolls to bound volumes. It's not hard to think of ways that scrolls would have been superior to codices, and while ultimately the latter may have been overall-better and certainly did win out, they weren't universally and in all ways better. Ultimately, the space-savings thing may win the day for ebooks (again, it is a huge advantage) and print books may largely vanish, but it won't be because ebooks are strictly superior formats for reading.

[jemmyw]

I understand your points, but, for all except "including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry)," I don't find them very compelling. For fiction an e-reader has been a great improvement, easier to handle, never lose your place, able to jump around the book and then back again, search, and probably most importantly ergonomics - larger text when I'm tired etc.

For non-fiction I do find it hard to understand how paper is better for you than on a monitor. Open 2 pages at once, yep, side by side is no problem, plus as many other pages as you like open at once with windows or tabs. Full text search AND the index, with clickable links to the places you want to go.

Jotting down notes in the margin - yes, I can see that would be an issue. But if its important I think I'd want to keep it separate anyway. I have one of those e-paper notepad things with a digital pen which I use for note taking or drawing freehand diagrams or music notation (and its nice because it has the templates so I don't have to go and search for the sheet music paper). The only feature I miss from real pens and paper is colour.

[yamtaddle]

> For non-fiction I do find it hard to understand how paper is better for you than on a monitor. Open 2 pages at once, yep, side by side is no problem, plus as many other pages as you like open at once with windows or tabs. Full text search AND the index, with clickable links to the places you want to go.

Not stuck to a monitor, for one thing. If you are at a desk, you can have like three open at once, two pages each, no problem, on a desk that's not even very big, plus a notebook out, all at once, no swiping between "desktops" or whatever. (admittedly, the huge-screen version of the iPad Pro can solve the "stuck to a desk/laptop" problem for reading textbooks/papers/etc.—it's pretty great at that, actually—but that's $1,000+ dollars and that only lets you have one open at once)

I do think ebooks are a pretty good—and probably, overall, strictly superior—replacement for casual-reading fiction, but I think the which-is-superior question gets murkier past that. Books can have lots of UI/presentation features and ebooks aren't great at matching all of them, especially when you're reading them on a portable device. Though, again, being able to have 10,000 books in your coat pocket is a pretty serious advantage even if everything else is a little to a lot worse.