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Poll Shows That 75% Prefer Printed Books To eBooks
Attila Dimedici writes "In a new Rasmussen poll, 75% of American adults would rather read a book in traditional print format than in an ebook format. Only 15% prefer the ebook format (the other 10% are undecided). The latter is a drop from the 23% that preferred the ebook format in Rasmussen's 2011 poll. In addition, more say they buy their books from a brick and mortar store than say they buy books online (35% from brick and mortar, 27% online). I suspect that the 27% who buy online buy more books, but these results are interesting and suggest that the brick and mortar bookstore is not necessarily doomed."
For casual reading, e-books are fine but for technical materials I prefer hard copy that way there's no fear that the distributor won't change their TOS and I wind up losing a ton of C++ reference material or my favorite books on Roman History.
Spoiler alert: If you're wondering about the Roman History part, the empire collapsed.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I like printed books; but, they don't match the convenience of electronic books. I carry an iPod touch and I read everywhere, waiting for a meal, waiting for the Doctor, waiting for the Dentist, waiting for the long query to finish. If I run through the current book, I buy another online. It doesn't matter that it is midnight or 2 a.m.. I have whole bookstores ready to serve me.
Now sitting down in front of the fireplace with that paper book is pleasant. I'm not waiting until Winter and enough spare time to do that. I'm addicted to electronic books and would not willingly go back.
I'd be interested to see the answers broken down by age. It may well be that most of the people who love paper books will be dead in 20 years.
I suspect there's also a "fake good" effect, in that people feel they ought to be supporting their local bookshop and therefore say that they do, even if, in fact, they buy a book a year in an airport and every other book on Amazon.
Personally, I really like paper, even for technical books, but all my colleagues look at me like I'm wearing sabre-toothed tiger skins and wielding a club.
Virtually serving coffee
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When I buy an eBook, I do not own the book. In order to read the book, I have to hope that some DRM server somewhere will authorize the eBook reader to show me the book I want to read.
I have books on my book shelves that are over 50 years old, and I can still read them fine. Can the same be said about eBooks 50 years from now?
Those are really really old studies.
I always get a good chuckle out of those that insist gaming will go all-digital and never look back. It's a fad, plain and simple. People hopped on the e-book bandwagon because it was cool, hip, and trendy to whip out your Kindle in the coffee shop or on the train, but now that people have gotten to see all the downsides of having books but not really having books the shine has worn off and they're back to buying hardcopies.
The same will happen with games. Once the shine of digital-only gaming (especially in the console arena) wears off and people realized they're getting screwed by not having a disc the trend will reverse itself and those companies that refuse to offer games on disc will ultimately suffer.
Well, more specifically, Amazon did. With a Kindle book, I can read it on any device (Kindle preferred, of course; love its display), can access my books anywhere with an Internet connection, and can even put documents I want to read on my devices onto my Kindle/cloud/etc by e-mail. Their implementation is rock-solid, and their main device feels just like reading a book to me.
I like both printed books and ebooks. They both have strengths and weaknesses, they complement each other rather than replace either in my view.
I like to have heavy to carry around technical books (DRM free) and vendor documentation on ebook reader. eBook also more convenient not causing problems to breathe compared to a 3000+ large page monster on you chest when you lay on couch, hammock or bed while reading. But then often reading experience on table or while sitting on good armchair with good lighting etc. often nothing comes near real printed book.
IMHO, eBook is great especially for short lived stuff, manuals that are updated few times a year with the product they describe and of course magazines, but printed books anything I expect to have more value over let's say 5 years.
And ironically these days losing a kindle would be less of a financial hardship than losing a couple of books. ( it wasn't that way not too long ago tho )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For me, reading a book is a journey through its pages.
Not in some metaphorical sense, but in a very literal, tactile, visual sense.
I associate the words in a book with their position on the page,
and the pages with their (approximate) position within the thickness of the book.
It helps me keep track of what I've read, and place words and passages in context of the overall book.
I never thought about any of this until I started reading eBooks and it wasn't there.
An eBook is just one long (long, long, very long) stream of words.
Some eBooks paginate the words for display, but that pagination is typically not stable:
revisit those words another time and they will likely appear on the screen in a different place.
And those pages--such as they are--have no apparent position within any larger structure.
This is OK for a dictionary or a reference manual, where I just look things up.
But for any serious work of non-fiction, it's horribly acontextual: the book just turns into word mush.
I haven't tried reading any fiction eBooks, so I don't know if they would fare any better.