[keiferski]

The problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them.

On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.

I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.

[Insanity]

I highlight often when reading on my kindle. I have created a small program that scrapes my highlights and sends me a daily email with one of them. I get it before I wake up and it’s the first thing I read once I check my email (usually that happens after my morning reading).

I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book.

That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.

[stuxnet79]

Could you share more details on how you were able to set this up? Do you use Koreader?

[Insanity]

I wrote a python script that I run locally which scrapes read.amazon.com (think this is the URL, I’ll double check when I’m home). Kindle highlights are automatically synced there. The Python scraper extracts all highlights into a json file and stores this in S3.

I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails.

I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop.

It’s a bit hacked together but it works lol.

[stuxnet79]

This is incredible, thanks for sharing!

[raddan]

> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.

I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.

[Carrok]

Maybe the cartridges could even contain the actual music. On an engraving that stores the audio information perhaps. This engraving could be played back and reproduce the audio. It probably would never work though.

[cadamsdotcom]

“The actual music” is just so hard to contain. A recording of a performance - is that the actual music? Or is the actual music the playing back of the recording with speakers and audio? Will all that be in the box? Or is it the entire band in your proposed box, ready to play whenever you pull it from the shelf? Or is it what you hear in your head in the shower?

Sounds like it’ll be quite the innovation.

[dhosek]

Hmm, I’m thinking that for this to work best, it really should be some sort of round medium, a disk or a cylinder of some sort. I think disks might be best because then you could engrave the music on both sides of the disk and more easily store them in protective containers on shelving units.

[lo_zamoyski]

> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.

This agrees with studies that show that memory retention is better among students when using physical books rather than ebooks. That's because we're embodied. The book is a physical object with physical features. These intelligible physical features create associations (spatial anchoring, sensory engagement) that reinforce memory. You also get a sense of progress as you read. For instance, when I read something, I better remember at what depth certain content is, and given the depth, I know more or less what is in that part of the book. You could think of it in terms of spatial indexing or in terms of data locality.

People think the medium doesn't matter. They think that it's just a matter of encoding. But the medium very much matters, because the senses are involved in memory formation in all sorts of ways. It's also why handwriting leads to better retention of information than typing.

[cbfrench]

I’m a big proponent of physical books: I have several thousand in my home. But last week, I finally got my first e-reader, the Xteink X4, which I got because it was small and cheap.

In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.

This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!

[onecommentman]

Then again, there is more to life than increasing its speed. (Gandhi). When I read a physical book, especially an early (hardback) edition, I’m reliving the experience of all the early readers of that book. A mug of tea, a warm light, perhaps a candle or oil lamp, a period chair — and I’m recreating the experience the Author imagined his/her readers would be experiencing. Digital for work, analog for pleasure.

[cbfrench]

That is very true, and certainly I’m in agreement that fast, digital reading isn’t necessarily desirable as a mode. Then again, my academic background is in English lit, and I’m a priest, so my professional reading has generally been slow and analog! Reading novels quickly allows me to become immersed in them without allowing my analytical lit-crit brain entirely to take over, and that itself is a nice change of pace, so the e-reader has been a welcome introduction. I do enough wrestling with dense theological texts that I appreciate being able simply to read.

[armenarmen]

Did you flash yours with cross point?

[cbfrench]

I did, and then I flashed Crossink, and I’m currently using vCodex at the moment, just because I wanted to check out the various options. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with vCodex, since I don’t really care that much about all of the stats, and I liked the interface of Crosspoint/Crossink marginally better.

[armenarmen]

I haven’t tried either of those. What do you like more about crossink?

[dylan604]

I'm not an ebook reader, but I would have assumed that these apps would have some sort of indication if you've read a book or not and if you've not read to the end some sort of progress. Like opening an ebook that you did not complete should hopefully take you to where you left off at a minimum. I'd also expect your app to have a management type of display where I'd expect some sort of sorting/filtering where you can see only the books completely read, the books started but not finished, and books not yet started. I'd even somewhat expect a skeuomorphic layout of books on a shelf that you could somehow rearrange like it was iPhone 1.0. Again, I'm not an ebook person and never used any of the apps, so maybe these are standard things. However, it should make things easier to know if you've read them or not.

[skydhash]

They do, but a physical book has a presence that digital books lack. Like weight, cover material, print quality. I can learn from digital books fine and read novels on an ereader. But a physical book anchor your memory like no other.

[dsr_]

If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.

If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.

[utopiah]

Have you considered printing a book side and putting it on a wall as a growing poster while keeping a Calibre or Zotero collection in sync?

[keiferski]

No but I have thought about making some sort of card or pseudo-book. Still not quite the same though, as the object wouldn’t be the one you actually read, just a reminder.

[utopiah]

TBH I'd rather have both and in sync, namely physical in place, nearby, and digital always with me. Unfortunately I can't afford that so I have a messy compromise.

[throwup238]

Make each pseudo-book a cheap cover around your ereader and just stick it in while reading :)

[daveshistory]

That's exactly how I feel although I do wonder if a lot of younger people, if any still become readers, will just a different, less physical relationship with their books than I do or you do.

It's probably a bad example but I don't have any physical connection with music or video anymore for instance, but I definitely remember having that kind of relationship with favorite records and tapes when I was a kid. And now I just... don't. It must be the same way for some people with e-books.

[dhosek]

As a bit of anecdata, my kids show a slight preference for physical books over ebooks, although they’re happy enough to listen to digital audio books. They have literally no experience with physical media for music but have at least encountered DVDs and Blu-Rays (although when I talk about watching something on disc they actively resist it—the convenience of pulling up something on streaming outweighs the limited selection available).

[dhosek]

A true story: literally hours after posting this, I was with my kids at Barnes and Noble and they had records and CDs for sale by the cash register and my daughter asked what they were and when I explained it to my kids, they were skeptical and asked why someone would want such things.

[daveshistory]

I saw a Discman in a museum a few years ago.

A Discman. They couldn't even use a Walkman.

[daveshistory]

I raised my kids with physical books. But when I was growing up we had a record turntable, and then a tape player, and I do remember having some kind of physical connection with my favorite music because of that.

It IS more inconvenient to have them pull them out. No question about that.

[Nevermark]

> The book itself is a kind of memory totem

My phrase for this is "Books are bookmarks".

Even unread books form a physical reminder to read, and of the import of the topic they cover.

When I come across a book that covers something important well, I buy it. I will likely read it, but even if it just keeps reminding me of the topic, reinforcing my integrated web of understanding, it is doing good.

[lukeschlather]

I have mixed feelings about Kindle, but I mostly read books on my phone these days, and my Kindle library is always there. I also have a physical bookshelf, but if I'm not home I can't review it so in some ways it's often less tangible than my Kindle library which I always carry with me.

[el_benhameen]

Not as satisfying as seeing your books, but I keep a running doc where I note the title, dates, a short synopsis, and a few sentences of thoughts for books I’ve read. It helps me keep track a little better.

[dhosek]

My greatest moment of this was being able to find a quote in a 500-page book I had read 8 years earlier in about 2 minutes thanks to the physical memory of my first encounter with that text.

[madcaptenor]

I share this feeling. When I want to free up some space, the books I get rid of are the ones I don't remember reading.

[esafak]

Aren't they the ones you'd want to read?

[madcaptenor]

I should clarify. I remember the fact that I read them but I don't remember anything about them.

[m463]

otoh regular books:

- can't be read in dark mode

- can't change font or font size (or line/paragraph spacing)

- can't use search

- can't be in multiple places (multiple devices)... uh, easily

- etc

I think you just have embrace the positives of whichever you choose.

[jen729w]

- you can't carry 50 of them in your backpack. Invaluable as I travel the world.

I still vastly prefer paper books, however.

[specproc]

I stopped travelling the world to build up a library.