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by jemmyw
1302 days ago
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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. |
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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.