Do you like E-books or are real books better? What was your personal experience?
I like e book readers. They have several advantages over physical books when it comes to page turning, meaning it can be done with one hand. Was very useful when the kids were infants and needed general holding and cuddles.
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Ebook reader.
You cant play games on a book.
Real books are better, because they give you higher retention rate and are easier to navigate/interact with.
So if youāre reading fiction or some book that is meant to be enjoyed, you should get it in paper form (and in original language as well).
For technical documentation ebook reader is a good idea, because technical documentation gets obsolete, and to carry all the books you might need youāll need a 6-wheeler truck. It is a device of your choice for references, documentation, overviews and all the other nonsense that may get obsolete next year.
So, physical books are the absolute best, resort to e-readers when you donāt have enough space or when dealing with some sort of reference you need to get close (and canāt just open on second screen for some reason).
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If you do get into ebooks; hereās a great site with a large selection of free books.
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Does anyone have any recommendations for ebook readers that are epub compatible? I was looking for one for my wife, she reads a lot of books from the library on her iphone 4s.
While not directly compatible, you can put epub books on a kindle if you use software like Calibre.
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This. Grab whatever ebook reader suits you best. Use Calibre to manage switching formats.
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Yeah, e-readers are great. Iāve been using Kindles for a while, most recently with the Voyage, but I have a Fire tablet as well. Itās just much easier and more convenient to read, especially with large books that would be a hassle to try to lay down and hold (which is really most programming books). The only down-side is that source code is usually formatted poorly (wrapping over lines) and mathematical formulas can be low quality resolution. Aside from that, everything is great.
Got a kindle, barely use it. I guess I like real books, thereās something actually special about the act of turning a page, resting on the book, itās a human thing, that you touch and smell and get lost in. Kindle just obnoxiously fades in and out and attracts your hair to it.
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We like real books but ran out of space. Now we are addicted to kindles & can be reading 4 books at once without a dangerous pile of books in the bedside table. We can also take 20-30 books each away with us without paying excess baggage like we did back in the 90ās when we travelled.
My grandmother loves reading but no longer has the strength to hold up books with large enough print so we got her a kindle. She makes the font as big as she wants & it is light enough for her to hold up.
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Too many moves killed our physical library. Itās hard to justify shipping books between countries. Weāve kept some favorites, but most of our books are digital now.
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Iām a sucker for real books too, but Iāve been reading on my Kindle Fire lately and Iām kind of loving it.
Itās definitely missing some of what makes real books nice. However, it has some real functional advantages:
- Using the Kindle Fire tablet itself is cool, but even cooler is that I have my book in my pocket on my phone for when Iām out. Waiting at a bus stop? Read a chunk. This has actually added a lot to my reading time, even if itās in little bits.
- I think Iām reading faster. Not sure why.
- Between the above two points Iām tearing through books. Iām getting more read than I used to. Or, perhaps Iām reading the same overall amount and itās more book and less random internet junk?
- No need for a separate light, and even page lighting by default. A definite annoyance with real books is getting light to cover all of the text without cracking the spine so far open that itās damaged and also without shining light on people who are trying to sleep next to you. A tablet lights itself, and (mostly) only itself. No other light needed at all.
- Stopped/slowed down filling up book cases. Seriously, the number of book cases here is already nuts, and weāre not even particularly avid readers. If you like buying books they have to go somewhereā¦ (plus thereās paper usage and printing process and such).
- Stopped (my) piles of books building up around the house. (Thanks @tedthebug !)
It has some downsides:
- Took ages to get used to.
- Doesnāt āfeelā as nice as reading a real book.
- Without trivialising the value of good booksā¦ prices really arenāt as cheap as Iād expect given how much cost is surely saved by not being printed, shipped, stored, and sold in a shop by humans. (Though I think other stores might be better in this regard and, seriously, when Iām reading a good book Iām not really thinking about the few dollars it cost me.)
- Even the dimmest setting is a bit too bright for an otherwise dark room on my Fire 7".
- Batteries! Not a big deal at home since power plugs are readily available. And e-ink readers are meant to be awesome in this regard anyway.
- About 20% of the time I buy a book I randomly canāt download it straight away. (Amazon?)
- Syncing between the tablet and the phone is a bit poor, especially given that itās one of Amazonās flagship features.
- On that note, the Windows Phone Kindle app kind of sucks all around. It commonly misses text ābetweenā pages, its page turning is slow, and when I get and start reading a new book it never picks that up on its own.
- Quality of featured/front page books on the storefront doesnāt seem nearly as high as that in physical stores. Itās probably that physical stores have to rely on well-known author names to shift stock, where digital stores are happy to put more flavour-of-the-month stuff up front because you can find that better known stuff with a search anyway. I just like that the staff at book stores have already done a lot of filtering for me in advance, where I scroll past a lot of stuff on the storefront.
Iāll probably get myself an e-ink based reader at some point, as itāll solve a bunch of the above.
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They are great for reading of novels and books with only text. Books that have more advanced layout with pictures and diagrams donāt work that good, as they are more dependent on the layout/page size in order to present the info well.
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Being a cheap arse I balk at paying almost full price for a digital book but there are a few apps or subscription emails that will send you daily updates for free or heavily discounted books. Quite a few of these are worth exactly what you pay for them & a rare few of them are actually so good that we fell for the trap & went & bought the rest of them.
I agree that things with images donāt work very well. I subscribe to the MIT IT magazine & the science &'fantasy magazine. I can recommend the scifi one, they have a free version that has a few short stories plus reviews by Charles de lint that has put us onto some absolutely brilliant books, the paid version has a lot of great stuff to read. The MIT one has that whole picture layout problem such that I often ignore the pictures because I canāt work out where they relate to the story.
At first I thought I wouldnāt like reading ebooks, but since Iāve got Kindle I canāt go back to reading conventional ones. It has multiple advantages:
- Takes much less space - my book shelves are already full as it is.
- Lighter - this is especially important when reading novels, as conventional novel books can be really heavy and uncomfortable to read unless youāre sitting at a desk.
- Easier to turn pages. Yes, this is a thing (a few years ago I would not have expected to ever claim that). Turning paper pages is a chore compared to turning them in an ebook.
- Much faster to get content - I now donāt need to go to a book store or wait for my online delivery: I can just download it the moment I buy it. Itās even more important if it takes a month to get a shipment from Amazon to your country (as in my case).
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Not admitting to anything. But Australian ebook distributors are about as effective as Australian Game of Thrones distributors. This can be considered as an advantage to ebooks over physical books.
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I prefer real books - thereās something about that 3D tactile experience that you just canāt replicate with an e-book. You get a feeling of progress as you work through the book - there is this mental spatial organization you get automatically. Itās difficult to describe but I think itās important to the reading experience.
That said, if Iām just doing light reading of āthrowawayā books (e.g. Clive Cussler) Iāll often read those in e-book form. But high quality books that I want to savor, those are always physical for me.
I know everyone does Kindle it seems, but I prefer my B&N Nook. It does epub natively as well so you can skip the Calibre step.
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I have a LOT of books. I love books. I collect first editions. I love the smell, the feel, theā¦ wow, I love books. Real books. Seriously. Hereās me in front of one of my many stuffed bookshelves (from a few years ago). So, when my wife got me a Kindle Paperwhite for my birthday, I sort of made a weird āthank youā face and thought, āhmmmm, will I ever actually use this??ā
Andā¦
I love my Kindle. It tells me how much time I have left in a book. I can look up unfamiliar words. I can take notes. I can carry an entire library around with me. The entire Robert E. Howard collection, for instance, which is all on my Kindle. My Philip K. Dick collection. On and on. Tons of books, in one compact, super nice unit. Itās easy on my eyes. Itās easy to hold (I got a leather āvintage bookā style case for it). Itās awesome. Get one if you like to read a lot. I bought one for my wife after she used mine and fell in love with it.
Even with all of the above said, though, I still choose to read many books in their original format. Thereās just something special about holding a paper book and making ones way through it. Some books I will only read in original format.
There you go.
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I went Kindle solely because I had the device lying around from doing testing for a game. In fact, I only started reading digital books at all because Iād finished my last physically purchased book and not yet placed a new order.
My wife had earlier looked into e-readers - more specifically, availability and pricing of books on their stores - and I think Nook is what she settled on as well.
I hugely agree with this. Iāve nothing at all against that kind of book, I read them from time to time myself, but it does strike me that thereās a heck of a lot of physical waste involved compared to the squirt of electrons for an e-book. All of that paper, printing, storage, shipping, then itāll get read two or three times, then nobody wants to throw it away so it just hangs around taking up spaceā¦ not to mention the draining experience of, eventually, having to cull the collection.
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