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The Case Against E-readers -- Why Digital Natives Prefer Reading On Paper
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes in the WaPo that textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer reading on paper for pleasure and learning. This bias surprises reading experts, given the same group's proclivity to consume most other content digitally. "These are people who aren't supposed to remember what it's like to even smell books," says Naomi S. Baron. "It's quite astounding." Earlier this month, Baron published Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, a book that examines university students' preferences for print and explains the science of why dead-tree versions are often superior to digital (PDF).
Her conclusion: readers tend to skim on screens, distraction is inevitable and comprehension suffers. Researchers say readers remember the location of information simply by page and text layout — that, say, the key piece of dialogue was on that page early in the book with that one long paragraph and a smudge on the corner. Researchers think this plays a key role in comprehension — something that is more difficult on screens, primarily because the time we devote to reading online is usually spent scanning and skimming, with few places (or little time) for mental markers.
Another significant problem, especially for college students, is distraction. The lives of millennials are increasingly lived on screens. In her surveys, Baron was surprised by the results to the question of whether students were more likely to multitask in hard copy (1 percent) vs. reading on-screen (90 percent). "When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship."
Her conclusion: readers tend to skim on screens, distraction is inevitable and comprehension suffers. Researchers say readers remember the location of information simply by page and text layout — that, say, the key piece of dialogue was on that page early in the book with that one long paragraph and a smudge on the corner. Researchers think this plays a key role in comprehension — something that is more difficult on screens, primarily because the time we devote to reading online is usually spent scanning and skimming, with few places (or little time) for mental markers.
Another significant problem, especially for college students, is distraction. The lives of millennials are increasingly lived on screens. In her surveys, Baron was surprised by the results to the question of whether students were more likely to multitask in hard copy (1 percent) vs. reading on-screen (90 percent). "When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship."
Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit over and beyond the simple fact that so many of the world's classics are available free of charge wherever you have internet access is a bonus that can't be overlooked. Honestly, in terms of studying books such as Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, I find myself eternally grateful for such capabilities. Not to mention, if you can read the book on your cell phone, you always have the right reading material on the toilet. :)
Sugapablo
The entire supposition that we're all mildly autistic ADHD scatterbrains is idiotic. Anyone who's picked up an e-reader versus a book can easily tell what their preferences are, and millenials aren't some new mutant genotype.
But I'm not, and eBooks are awesome. I don't have physical space for dead trees in my house, and I can't imagine millenials are doing any better. Let's face it, most stuff we read for pleasure doesn't need to be recalled with anything other than casual clarity. We're not hanging on to carefully wordsmithed literature, we're reading mass market fiction with a good story but relatively low literary value.
Publishers need to return their money to the shareholders so the rest of the world can get on with life.
I only skimmed the summary.
3D printing and the post-singularity game changing private space colonies?
In her surveys, Baron was surprised by the results to the question of whether students were more likely to multitask in hard copy (1 percent) vs. reading on-screen (90 percent). "When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship."
So get a Sony e-Reader (now super-cheap due to being abandoned) or a Nook Simple touch. They technically have internet access, but you can't really browse on them. Not because of the display, because of the browser.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Much of my recreational reading involves reading in bed just before I go to sleep. Being able to relax by lying down while I read is a huge benefit of my e-reader. Try reading both the left and right page, while lying down and holding a traditional book with one hand. Not easy.
Considering that most likely 2/3 of the people polled are textbook publishers and bookstore owners, and 1/3 students that isn't a surprising finding, How about JUST polling readers.
When I read to go to sleep, it's paper all the way. The bright light of 'ereaders' keeps me awake.
Dead Trees for the win - or used toilet paper.
I have an iPad and its the best all around reader ever - Kindle, Nook, Zinio, ePub, etc .... It paid for itself within a year - at least the iPad2 did.
BUT....it keeps me awake. I pull out the dead tree books when I need to sleep.
My Library comes to my rescue in that case.
I can be distracted while reading a paper book just as easily as I can be distracted while reading on my Kindle.
Something smells funny here... you might almost think they didn't look at dedicated e-readers at all, but only at multifunction devices such as phones or tablets. Nah, no researcher would be that sloppy, right?
Who exactly funded this research again?
#DeleteChrome
Searching is the killer app of e-readers (or just PDFs) to me. Even if I have a physical book, which is sometimes easier to reference, I like having a PDF that I can search in. Fiction, nonfiction, reference manual...doesn't matter, still want search.
I've used both ebooks and paper. Dead trees are satisfying in a way that electronic books just are not. However, I can carry a much larger libary in my phone then I ever will in paper. I still haunt the used book stores. Much better feeling when reading.
For me. Your milage may differ.
As a student working on an MBA I read on a tablet without distraction just fine. If more textbooks were available on a kindle then I would have bought a standard Kindle over using a Dell Venue 8 Pro. My school offers all the textbooks as part of tuition electronically. Comprehension does not fail due to it being digital over a paper copy. People don't know how to read and learn anymore. In the digital format you could also integrate quizzes and testing throughout the book, highlighting is great and adding options to build a bibliography from a text quote would be amazing. This just strikes me as something that people lie about in a survey. They want to appear more intellectual so they say I love the smell of books. A textbook weighs a ton so I would rather have one little device that has all my books in it that I can carry in a bag without breaking my back.
My librarian wife and I are both pretty avid readers and we both use e-readers for vast majority of our reading. Inevitably someone will see us in the doctor office waiting room or some other place reading our ebooks and tell us how they prefer "real books". That's when I like to ask them what the last book they read was and chuckle to myself when they get that deer in the headlights look.
There needs to be a distinction made between E Ink vs LCD/OLED screens.
Whilst I'm not a millennial, I do enjoy reading. I can't really get into reading large amounts of text on an LCD or OLED screen whereas I read almost every night on a Kindle with an E Ink screen. On the other hand, I can't enjoy reading news and current affairs on the Kindle - it's better on an iPad or computer screen.
Reading on a Kindle is a lot more like reading a dead tree book. There are less distractions and the screen is easier on your eyes, particularly when reading in bright sunlight or in a darkened room.
I prefer eBooks for pleasure reading because of the convenience of packaging mostly. I like the fact that I can take a whole library of books with me and choose which ones I read on a whim. Reading for pleasure is also a serial activity where you read through the book from start to finish with very little back flipping. For studying however, I prefer the physical books as you can dog-ear, color-code post-it, highlight sections for quick reference. Yes eReaders have search and bookmarking capabilities, but I just don't find it as convenient as going back to my yellow post-it half way in the last chapter which I've scribbled with a keyword.
anybody know of a good eInk reader, 10" size, with good pdf support? still looking after all these years. the kindle DX came closest, but had crap for pdf support. wish they had kept it going.
I just started grad school. I decided to buy my textbook for my kindle fire tablet rather than a physical copy because it was cheaper.
The digital copy is basically a scan of the physical book. It's not formatted for the screen at all. I must zoom in on each page to read it and it's rather tedious. If I read the book on my android tablet, i can at least make out the text without zooming but it's small print. I must lock the orientation because half the charts are sideways!
I also can't read it via web browser like some amazon books because they DRM'd it too much!
The bias could be due to the horrible way that some publishers format their books. A few bad experiences like this and it would stop anyone from buying a digital book again.
Our Corgi chewed up my entire GOT collection but won't touch an e-reader.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Its not that complex.
Price: investing in a 'dead-tree' version of your education materials is exactly that, its an investment. One many expect to get a return on later by selling it back to the bookstore at the end of the semester, especially as prices on textbooks in the US continues to skyrocket. You cannot sell back ebooks.
Size: textbooks have a lot of information to impart, the per-page size is usually rather large, unlike pleasure-reading materials which are arranged in simple chapters and paragraphs, textbooks include graphic elements. On a 7 inch screen this leaves a lot to be desired, having to zoom constantly to read and refer to info-graphics is tiresome. This gets better on larger devices but many want the portability of smaller tablets, also the lower price point for these devices is a factor.
Usability: Ok so you got an ebook, now what? Can you do inline notations? Highlighting? Doodle? Is skipping pages easy or difficult (as a lot of core subjects tend to cover parts of a textbook and not all, you do a LOT of page skipping)? Physical textbooks are able to do all of this with nothing more than your hands and a pen. Ebooks software is generally horrible and non-standardized at all. Mostly in an effort to retain market dominance in a market that shouldn't have any dominant players...its software. Imagine each publisher using completely different formats for physical books. So some never use the backside of a page for the next page, others laminate all pages, another one prints from back to front (but still in the normal left to right reading format), etc. This is basically what you get with competing e-reader software. And it is ridiculous. the Music industry isn't like this, every single mp3 player has basically the same controls and options because that is what people want. The way some e-reader software works i half believe the people who made it do not actually know how to read.
All that said, i love ebooks. I use a 7-inch tablet and my phone to read, for pleasure and education. But for hard-core learning, i have to go the full-sized computer or laptop for e-textbooks to be able to use them with any degree of ease and comfort. Its little wonder the Gadget Generation still wants to use physical books too.
For me, being able to haul around thousands of books and references on a 200 gram e-ink device that goes weeks on a single charge, syncs my current page to all other devices, allows access to dictionaries and wikipedia, and allows easy annotations outweighs all other potential benefits of classic books.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
But I always buy the textbook. If the class is just one semester, I buy a used copy.
Same goes for reference texts.
The rest I get at the library or a bookstore. Paperbacks preferred, but Picketty's Capital isn't out in paperback yet.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I like having and reading physical books. I really can't explain why, so I do not have much to contribute.
I prefer reading on my tablet.
"When a digital device has an Internet connection, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship" to me is not an indication of the reader being tempted to jump ship. If the person who wrote the book is so incapable of creating a story (*cough* *Twilight* *cough* *Too Many Shades of Bad Writing* *cough*) with a plot or characters that can't hold the readers interest, it is only natural that the reader will "jump ship." The challenge to today's authors - people who actually know how to write and not just type words into notepad - is to create stories compelling enough to make the reader forget that their device has an internet connection. There are some authors out there, like Cory Doctorow, whose books have to be read near internet connection, but that is due to the nature of their plots and should not be construed as a failure of the writers. It is not possible to fully explain the background of a story like Little Brother or Homeland in situ without losing a reader in the details or devolving into a bad parody of Tolkien's "two and a half pages to describe a soup" writing style.
When it comes to e-readers and e-reader apps - glossy screen devices are either toys or for quickly looking something up before going back to playing Angry Birds or Candy Crush, non-glare screens are what you want if you are reading for enjoyment.
I do have to admit that the I find the tangible aspects of opening a physical book are bit more pleasurable than turning on a e-reader.
Well I guess they're not really experts if they were surprised...
I have to agree, my fellow AC. I love my Kindle.
I buy dead tree editions of books I expect I'll want to keep for the long-term. But things that will be obsolete (and replaced) in 3 or 4 years will generally be electronic.
One thing I've yet to see anyone mention is the ability of ebook readers to change font size. For folks who have poor eyesight, like me, that's a tremendous benefit.
Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit over and beyond the simple fact that so many of the world's classics are available free of charge wherever you have internet access is a bonus that can't be overlooked. Honestly, in terms of studying books such as Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, I find myself eternally grateful for such capabilities.
I agree wholeheartedly that the eBook experience *could* be much better than physical books, but it isn't.
As an experiment, I recently picked up a reader and tried it (Sony eReader). Here's what I found:
All in all, I haven't used my eReader much.
It might be OK for narrative stories, light paperback reading that you can do in a dentist's office, and if it's a modern eBook written with proper formatting, but for anything remotely sophisticated it's insufficient.
I'm more interested in what this says about the Washington Post than the book. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. TFA is a book review with a link to Amazon, where you can buy the book. I wonder if this is part of the owner's strategy to make the paper profitable. And why does the entire article ignore the difference between color displays and e-ink?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
I switch back and forth between a Kindle and physical books. I have a slight preference for the dead tree books. They feel nicer, it's easier to find my place by feel if I put the book aside for a while and they will still work if the battery dies. Plus most books in my collection will survive if I happen to drop one of them and they aren't hindered by DRM. Physical books have a nice smell too and are easy to share with other people. E-readers have their perks. They take up less space and they tend to be lighter than most books. For people who travel a lot I think e-books make a lot of sense. But physical books have a lot of benefits over e-books that I suspect will keep them around for a long time.
I use electronic readers for work/hobby related reference material, however I'll always buy paperback novels when travelling. That's my preference when reading for pleasure.
People with poor self control prefer limits on their behavior. I guess they have enough self control to recognize their own deficiencies, but not enough to fix them.
What's with the "dead tree" crap? How about the "easy to flip thru" or "fun to use" version? After all, you don't refer to the popcorn you are eating while reading Slashdot as the "dead seed" snack.
but my LFR queue just popped.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
At home, I read on my laptop using the Kindle for PC software, or Adobe Reader. But, if I were to be travelling on the NYC subway, or eating out, I prefer taking a printed book.
I don't expect to be robbed for a book, but a tablet of any kind and even an iPhone is in danger of being stolen.
I also prefer real paper magazines to electronic versions. I've stopped reading every magazine that decided they were only going to publish electronic editions. If they want my subscription dollars and eyes back, they only need to resume a print edition.
Perhaps none of my preferences are logical, but they don't have to be. I tried using my tablet for reading everywhere, and it was inconvenient, would run out of power at it the worst times, and caused people to interrupt my reading to ask questions about the tablet too.
Holy hell am I ever sick and tired of the term "digital native".
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. My first computer was a TI-99 4/A with 16 K of RAM. Then a Commodore 128, Amiga, etc. I've been a "digital native" as long as I can remember.
I went back to university a few years ago (when I was in my 30s), and those digital native kids that I was taking classes with? Well they couldn't compute their way out of a paper bag. Sure they might know how to use Facebook - but native? Hardly. They still didn't understand the difference between a hard drive and RAM ... and they still made all the same bone-headed mistakes using a computer as their clueless peers in the 1990s made (hey! I just got a weird email with an attachment! Let me open it and see what it is!)
After graduating, I ended up working for the university, helping profs integrate and use technology in their courses - and every prof was under the mistaken assumption that these kids were somehow technologically gifted, just by virtue of having been born in the late 80s/early 90s.
Ridiculous. Kids today aren't digital natives.
Motherfucker, PLEASE.
We'd all be better off if you idiots sucked a pustule-covered cock instead of sitting
around thinking up cute phrases.
Either boomers and millennials are completely different, the millennials need to try a REAL e-reader or I'm unusual. I like reading on my e-ink Kindle with no back-light better than reading a printed book.
Bacon is BAD for you? NOOOO!!!! I REFUSE to believe it!!!
I have read ebooks for at least 10 years now. But it has always frustrated me as to how poor the combination of rigid layout and poor application design makes ebooks vastly inferior. HTML was invented such a long time ago and has been such a huge success in presenting text with images across multiple platforms. Navigable links (with 'back'), re-flow to fit the frame, easily variable scale are just some of the key advantages. However instead of publishing into this format, or emulating it, publishers have chosen various inferior models. The human brain can manage printed books very well just as the summary points out. However if good formats and readers are provided then ebooks present enough advantages to grow even more popular.
Finally, the elephant in the room is the very poor value model that most DRM encumbered ebook formats represent. Anyone who has wrestled with ADE to access their purchased book can easily see the advantage of owning a paper book.
it seems like for most people, digital reading is fine when it's just "straight ahead" fiction reading. you're approaching the material linearly and with the exception of a couple of flip backs every now and again, you're just going from start to finish one page at a time. i read almost all my novels like this.
it's really different if you're reading a textbook or manual where you might have to access information in a wide variety of places at any moment. in such cases, books tend to be better and faster because you can go immediately to any page that you've dog eared or even by pure muscle memory remember about where it is relative to the thickness of the book. and page flips are instant. try flipping 25 pages with a book looking for information and then doing the same on a kindle. screen refresh on e-paper is still VASTLY inferior to a moist thumb. even in this day, there's all kinds of inexplicable delays in just going to page 124 on digital vs on paper. paper really is superior for instantly going to any page and the interface for doing that is faaaaaaaar better with paper.
there are ways to get close to this speed on a pc or a laptop but only by really changing up the paradigm of how one searches a book for information - i.e. not flipping pages looking but explicitly using the search function. and in any case where you would be looking through the glossary, digital would be better and faster.
not to mention that taking notes on the book pages itself is better and faster in analog. lots of apps where you CAN do this... but none of them are as fast as hiliter and pen in hand.
for learning things like programming, or a graphics program or even the dungeon master's guide, if i could choose only one medium, i prefer paper books with pens and sticky notes and hiliters. ideally though, i'd have both.
E-books should cost 20% of what the current charges are.
Was going to buy an electronic copy of a book I own (after seeing it mentioned on /.) for easier access, but $50 for a hardcover is absurd when there is a copy somewhere in one of my boxes somewhere, and no electronic versions were available.
My wife has no objections to re-buying some titles, but it is absurd.
Same here. My Sony e-reader is great at the beach and it's obvious the survey is conflating people who use e-readers with people who try to read books on an iPad. Not the same thing at all. The e-reader is clearly inferior to a book for non-fiction containing maps and photos, but for works of fiction it's just as immersive if not more so than a paper book.
The summary makes no mention of e-readers and makes points that are not relevant to e-readers.
An e-readers is not simply a device that displays a book or magazine.
Then it will generally still work, will probably be cheap to replace, and in case it is damaged, it will still be at least nearly perfectly usable. In the case of my android tablet that I used to use for this, I made the mistake of leaving in on the floor next to the power socket whilst on charge (short power cable and all that), was enthusiastically showing a friend round my toy collection (toy=laptop/workstation/synth/etc) and accidently put my chairleg down on my android tablet. It still boots but touchscreen functionality doesn't work and, being a cheap tablet, usb otg didn't work properly anyway, so its now unusable. If it were a real book, it wouldn't even have broken! That's why I do not trust e-readers for books that are even remotely important: they are just too fragile and, even though I'm careful 99% of the time, there is that issue of the remaining 1% where even the most careful human doesn't have his (or her) brain engaged properly and is temporarily a complete klutz. Real paperware books are reasonably robust against issues of accidental clumsiness. And robustness saves lives! Seriously, suppose you're on the ISS and the only copy of the maintenance manual is accessible via an e-reader and you break it?
John_Chalisque
etc etc etc. People always forget the e-ink devices. probably because they're so boring and uncool and you can't Facebook or whatever the fuck on it. I really, really miss my PRS-300 and -600. I don't miss my tablets.
I wonder if this study would turn out any different if they excluded all tablets disguised as readers. E-ink only.
I understand that something like an iPad can be considered an e-reader, but I don't believe that it is. I believe a lot of people's problems stem from the fact that they use the term "e-reader" on devices that aren't exactly e-readers. Reading on an iPad is way different than reading on a Kobo or a Kindle with an e-Ink screen. They aren't these miraculous Internet devices that let you play games and surf all the distracting web sites. They don't have the glowing screen of an iPad and they aren't prone to losing battery power within a few hours. The text looks almost exactly like a real book, except it can often be reflowed so that it is larger and easier to read.
I Personally feel the user interface in ebook readers vs a physical book is completely lacking in features. Consider the following areas in which books certainly excel
1.)Browsing Around: A real book allows you to move forward or backward way more easily then small next/forward,scroll bar does on a ereader. Further when moving between pages, the discontinuous screen refresh in any ereader contributes to you loosing focus.
2.)Viewing Multiple Pages: On a real book you use your hand as a temporary bookmark to quickly jump between two pages, On a ereader this might involve navigating menus, waiting for screen refresh and other annoyances.
3.)Taking Notes: Handwriting beats typing any day for small notes which may contain figures, underlines Symbols. Even with a $1 pen beats any stylus out there.
Of course there are numerous areas where e-readers excel like augmented content, search tools, information to weight ratio etc. I am sure all these will change in time some with ui innovations and other with improved technology.
I am personally surprised no body used a physical knob(iWatch like but larger) for navigating between pages on a ereader.
"Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit "
And thus bring up thousand more distraction to break your reading. In my experience (having tested both) it is far far better for comprehension and reading "wellness" to simply note on a side paper what you want to search later and leave it there until you are finished reading. Unless there is a word which stops you understanding completely (which should be quite rare for the average book) this works well.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It is obvious and it pains me that supposed experts can't see it. If you are studying a vast, technical subject you will end up reviewing something in the past chapters in order to understand what you're reading now; you can even keep the fingers between many pages at once: you can't do that on a e-book. You can also skim through the pages (like thumbnails, but faster and with regular-sized pages! Whoa!), go back and forvard of many pages at once, using the precious visual memory that humans have and not trying to remember the number of the page, because remembering numbers is natural for machines and not for humans.
tl;dr: the paper book is a vastly superior interface. Bulkier for sure, but that's about the only drawback.
I've been waiting 15 years for an e-reader that has A4 page size, and doesn't cost $400 or more. I don't read bodice rippers or stupid dime store scifi novels. I do read lots of journal articles and academic papers (all PDFs, I'm not going to redesign my life around a stupid device, get over it). Seems the industry is HIGHLY resistant to this simple notion for some reason (probably concerned with inability to create vendor lock in, and force shitty content down peoples throats).
Two words... Used Books. The first sale doctrine remains supreme with paper. I can buy/sell/trade used paper books anytime I want without DRM restrictions. I can typically get a used and many times a new book for cheaper than ebook price on Amazon. The only exception is some out of print books. I have the negative price savings of ebooks, then I have to shell out another 100 dollars for a fragile kindle that suffers from planned obsolescence, that I will have to pay additional money for if I don't want it to spew ads at me. I have to pay more money for an ebook reader for the privilege of paying more money for ebooks. It makes no economic sense.
If something is just dumped on you by authority, you really have a hard time learning from it. It's why you get given homework to do ON YOUR OWN when at school: you try to get the right answer and even if you fail, you have learned what you didn't understand about what was taught when your reasoned attempt to re-create it at home fails and your error is shown up.
It's the same with ANY skill or knowledge to learn: if you're shown, you likely forget it within 5 minutes (Short term memory, but not downloaded to long term memory). If you try and try and then fail after 20 minutes of trying, THEN someone comes along and shows you, you can connect that learning with the efforts you took 20 minutes ago (now having to be in long term memory), and actually REMEMBER that stuff.
And all the knowledge shown you is NOT LEARNING if you don't bloody REMEMBER it.
So, yes, a bookreader app on a desktop computer, tablet,phablet, phone or e-ink device IS an e-reader. Though in the case of the majority of those categories, the e-reader would be more appliccable to the name of the app rather than the device.
But "e-reader" is NOT "e-ink e-reader", which is why they need the qualifier term "e-ink".
I hope this gets seen by all those scores of "users" who seem to think that e-readers are not the LCD screen tablets with e-reader software. I doubt they will and doubt they'll accept if they do, preferring to claim "It isn't because I've defined it as not!".
Everybody assumes that you're going to be reading books on normal tablets with full color backlit displays. The problem with them is that they SUCK when reading for extended periods.
E-Ink readers, on the other hand, are fantastic for reading for hours on end. They're nowhere near as hard on your eyes, you can take them outside in the sun and they're every bit as readable as they were indoors. They last for weeks on a single charge and you can carry hundreds or thousands of books with you on a device that weighs less than most hardback books.
Do I prefer reading a real book over reading on an iPad or a typical LCD Android tablet? Of course. Is it better than reading on an e-ink reader? For plain text, no it isn't. If you're reading a book that needs color illustrations and pictures to illustrate a point (meaning, many, many textbooks), real paper is better, yeah, but if you're just reading plain text, e-ink readers are the way to go.
For anything that has pictures, charts, graphs or formulas, I definitely want the dead tree version. I can't imagine using a Kindle for my college textbooks or any technical manuals The zoom features aren't great and you're sometimes reading text on one page pertinent to a graphic on another page. I already regret having bought 'Capital in the 21st Century" as an e-book precisely for that reason.
For pure text, like a novel, the Kindle is awesome. Portable, comfortable to hold, long battery life. If you've ever read a really fat paperback (Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down" comes to mind), just holding the damned thing open is a pain. I love the fact that you can read the Kindle, say at breakfast, without having to use hands to hold the book open. Same with a stationary exercise machine. It's also nice that you can zoom on the text in case the motion of your head is making the print hard to read.
I think the best and most invaluable feature of having an e-reader is Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Want to read or reference Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, or go back and read Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo or many other old classics? All free (and legal) via the web site.
Of course there's always the zombie apocalypse scenario where electricity would be hard to come by, but until then, the e-reader provides a lot of utility .
Also, the double column IEEE layout is an absolute bitch to read on a kindle...
But I like e-readers because I read a lot, am poor, and so can more easily steal books.
Other than earning and paying more than, say, $10k, how can I have at the ready scores of up to date textbooks in a plethora of fields?
Oh, that fit in my bag.
As someone who modified his TI-85 calculator to be able to store and display text for reading in high school in 1997, I think I qualify as a “digital native.” I’ve no use for dead tree books. I have a stack of paper books sitting on my desk I’ll most likely never read.
I always have my phone in my pocket, usually have my iPad on my shoulder, and can pull them out and read a few paragraphs whenever I get a few minutes. Not so with a paper book, so the only time I’d read them would be at home, and generally I’ve got other things to do then. The ability to hold libraries worth of text in my pocket far out weighs (well, no, maybe under-weighs?) any value that might be had from a physical object. I’m accustomed to the interface of an e-reader, and while it takes some adaptation and learning to be able to find things quickly (no dog eared pages on my phone), I still manage pretty well. The availability wins.
As far as the screen keeping me awake? Given the number of times I’ve smashed myself in the nose with my iPad as I nod off reading in bed, I don’t think it works like that. At least not for me.
And I vowed to never again buy a paper book that is available in electronic format in my life. There are no distractions in the kindle and I can have all the books I want at any time and, you know, not cut down a tree in the process. But really I believe it is a better experience, books are heavy and I get enough wrist strain from using my computer, I can leave markers and it is easier to use the index for text-books. Sure the amazon DRM is not very cool but the convenience makes up for it.
In my opinion they should be giving kids kindles and not ipads in schools. When I was a child I was hungry to find good books but I could never find or afford to buy them.
> When a digital device has to sit and spin after every single click or action, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship.
Fixed.
A book has better real estate than a phone. A book has absolutely, non-figuratively, zero UI lag. A book is lightweight, portable, you can drop it on concrete from 10ft and you don't need to stress over keeping track of a valuable. It's paper, it's worthless.
It's hard to resist the temptation to jump shit when GUI devs dick around with faders and sliders and icon bullshit, and endless bloat. And then it's menus within menus of navigation - we pound the life out of hotkeys and shortcuts to get around it.
E-readers are very specialized devices. They are usually e-ink based and the only thing they do is display pages from a book. No web browsing, no apps.
When you start adding things like connectivity (except maybe syncing of books and annotations), web searching, or anything that isn't about reading books, you have a computer, not an e-reader.
I think there is a big difference between text that you would want to take notes along side of the text and those books that are a more casual read.
For note taking, e-readers have still not perfected the ease of having a pen and being about to write directly on on in the margins of text. Print books still excel there.
But for casual reading, a device like a kindle paper-white is better in almost all regards. Reading at night off of its adjustable lit screen is perfect for not keeping you awake if you are trying to get to sleep. 90% of people that I have suggested one to have enjoyed it.
I read quite a bit, and while I've got some interest in picking up an real e-reader some time, the fact that the pages aren't really typeset (the layout changes based on font size) and there's no physical/spatial reference for the place in the book is a big turnoff for me. I've also found that having access to too many things at once (as in, basically everything that was published before ~1930) can ultimately damp my enthusiasm for reading. Having 5 or 6 real books that I've checked out from the library or used book store is enough for me.
I do fit into the Millenial generation, and honestly it seems to me that when I compare myself to my parents or grandparents, I'm more aware of and sensitive to the negative impacts of technology. I find that it is much easier for me to focus on writing with a pen and paper, for instance. I was talking with my grandpa recently, and he was talking about how he hardly had any time in the day because it takes him so long to keep up with email throughout the day. When I told him I opened up my schedule by ditching TV, he seemed like he had never even considered such a thing. As another example, my stepdad's mom is one of the worst people I know with phone etiquette - she's on her iPhone continually playing free-to-play games, even in the midst of family gatherings. Many people I know in the millenial generation will go out of their way to remove apps on their phones that are too time consuming.
The point being, I think millenials are more attuned to the negative aspects of technology, or rather, place more emphasis on the benefits (often intangible) of older technologies and will pick from the era that suits them. Or perhaps they just reject the notion of unidirectional progress, such that newer is always better. Consider the resurgence of vinyl albums, or the surging interest in "retro" gaming, or the entire steampunk movement - all of these things are driven by millenials, and are at least somewhat anachronistic. It's an interesting trend, and I think this apparent e-reader aversion is just one more example.
Agreed. I don't know why these surveys can't differentiate between a true e-reader with an e-ink screen and other LCD/LED type devices. They are completely different experiences. E-ink devices typically don't do much else so there is no interruption from the device itself.
A couple of years ago when I flew through the US everyone had an e-reader. The last time I flew, which was late last year, everyone had paper books. I notice that the bookstores in US airports still seem to be going strong - Amazon is still selling books hand over fist.
Sure, e-readers are great for storing millions of books (that you can't lend to your friends... dang it), but they just suck.
I'm closer to 60 then 50. Most people my age would prefer paper books. No argument. I'm just not one of them. I prefer having 200+ books in my back pocket. My e-reader, ideally, let's me annotate what I'm reading.... So I have searchable relevant markers. I can look up words that need looking up. When reading on my phone on a plane I hold it with 3-4 fingers - lightly - whereas the person next to me with a big fat paper novel soon grows tired of wrangling the big, fat thing. Distraction? Don't be! Grow some self discipline.
Only boring people are ever bored.
I'm uninterested in DRM'd e-readers or any e-reader that reveals my location, refuses to let me copy, quote, print, and do other things I do with books. I'm unwilling to sacrifice my rights because some publisher wants a rent scheme on books or wants me to constantly feed them information on my whereabouts, what I'm reading, logging my name with what I read (which even my local library only does as long as the loan), and other privacy violations that simply aren't possible with books. Calling DRM "digital restrictions management" is right and proper because that frames the debate where it belongs—around user's rights.
Digital Citizen
Amen. I don't like extended reading on an illuminated screen. Not on a computer, not on a phone, not on a tablet. They all make me feel the same way, like I need to get away from the screen. The e-ink display is not like that. I can read for hours without that feeling vs. maybe 20 minutes on an illuminated screen.
On thing that is awkward is trying to flip back a bit to re-read something. When reading a physical book, I inately have an idea of how big a chunk of pages I need to peel back. With the e-reader, I needed to learn to look at the percentage indicator to get an idea. But that is a small compromise for having 20 or 30 (easily) books in my pocket (big pockets, old guy, loose pants, don't try this in skinny jeans).
I'm currently carting around 200 books in my Kindle.
And let's not forget that the resolution of a "Retina" display is still a joke compared to that of a printed page
1. Room in my house. I have a small house; the number of books that can fit inside is limited. We're a 6 person, homeschooling family, and my husband collects comic books. My books get the least space priority.
2. The ability to immediately start a new book when I finish a book, without having to carry around multiple books. I can also immediately check out a new book from the library without waiting for my husband to get home with the car, and then fighting the snow and sub-zero temperatures.
3. No-handed reading. With a dead-tree book, I have to hold it open. With an ereader, I can do something else with my hands, pausing only to press the "next page" button when necessary. I often use this to knit or crochet while reading.
4. The ability to switch between ebooks and audio books, or reading and using text-to-speech. I can continue the book while I have to cook, drive somewhere, etc.
5. Weight. My Kindle is much lighter than most dead tree books I read, making it much more comfortable to hold. I can read longer because my hands/wrists don't get tired.
6. Okay, I'll admit it... piracy. I buy a lot of ebooks, get ebooks from my local library and am subscribed to Kindle Unlimited, but I pirate books too. (Most often books I can't get electronic versions of legally.) Printing out a whole novel when you're paying for your own ink is not cost effective, though admittedly I did it a few times in the 90s using the free printing at the school library.