Nonsense. Not how it works at all. Your books “:live” in the “cloud” and you can redownload them any time you wish and if you have Internet, you can read them on damn near anything with a browser.
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He wouldn’t have lost any books if the reader didn’t turn up. They’re all on Amazon or, if bought elsewhere, probably eligible for repeat downloading from the seller. Also, I have three readers, at places around the house where I read, which means the current books will likely be on all three. They all synch to the most-recently read page.
Books I’ve created myself, for example by combining a bunch of online articles, are in my Calibre library which is multiply backed up.
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Yeah but e-readers are crap for insulation.
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I think you meant to reply to @Shuck 
But anyway, if it’s your only device that you can read comfortably on, you’re SOL until you get another.
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“I too fall prey to the nostalgia and melancholy of books.”
Some people do have a thing for the feel and even smell of a book, but for me it’s just a technology that still works; for the most part easily carried, can be lent or given to the library, can easily be marked up and referred to when citing references, blahblahblah. If I had to move a lot or had real space concerns, then books would work less well for me (hardcovers and oversized paperbacks are indeed a pain to carry).
And mentioning libraries reminds me: I got this out from my local library (which also lends ebooks; one of these days I’ll have to try that!) and it was very interesting. The Mark Kurlansky book Paper may very well cover some of the same ground as this; I haven’t yet read that one:
And speaking of technological transformations, this book gets into the changes that happened around the start of print (which actually took an interestingly twisty path toward primacy):
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And anything with a lithium-ion battery uses cobalt, and 20% of the cobalt supply is created with child labor.
I mean, I love the Voyage too and would easily recommend it over the Kindle. But let’s be honest about these things.
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Are you talking about e-readers or tablets/phones here? My e-reader (with e-ink display) only runs out of power when I don’t plug it in to a power source for a couple of weeks, which is very rare. They drain very little power compared to tablets as they don’t need to constantly supply power to the screen.
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Koreader (see https://koreader.rocks ) is a great free, open-source ebook reader that works great on the Kobo. I have an older Kobo Aura HD and use Koreader to read PDFs on it all the time. This has replaced any tablet or tablet as my primary way of consuming pdfs.
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Typeface is the design of the face of type. Font is a size. You said you can choose the font and size. That’s redundant.
Palatino is a typeface.
12 Point is a Font.
Just because the original 9" Mac Screen was so small, they lumped typefaces and fonts under a menu called FONT, because FONT took up less space in the menubar.
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Thanks for that trivia. I often wondered and never looked it up.
Palatino is a great typeface, BTW. I set my thesis in it. Superby readable, and quite elegant, too. And works on screen as well.
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I feel the same about my Paperwhite. I’ve had it for about four years now, If and when it comes to replacement time I’ll check out the Voyage but right now my trusty ole paperwhite and I will continue to spend our nights together.
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I have a Kindle 3rd model, still going strong with battery life 8 years on. It is great for text, not very good for PDF.
I would love an a4 sized ebook to enjoy all those magazines on archive.org
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I had some sort of kindle touch which had a text-to-speech program. I could listen to Gutenberg project books in the car. When Amazon found out there was a market for audio books that feature disappeared.
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I have a Kobo Aura One (with the big 7.8" screen) and I love it dearly, especially for travelling, but I really hate it when people go on about the ‘permanence’ of ebooks.
I have paper books in my collection which were printed in the 70s and can’t be bought any more. Conversely, if you seriously think that you’ll be able to download and read any of the ebooks you paid for fifty years from now you’re delusional. There are so many things that have to happen for that to be the case:
- The company has to remain in business.
- They have to keep offering that book, which relies on them not losing the rights to it in some kind of copyright argle-bargle.
- You have to remember the details of the account they’re associated with.
- There have to still be devices/programs which can interpret the file type they’re in.
- There have to be no changes in the law/T.O.S. of the company to prohibit multiple re-downloads of the same book (wouldn’t that be a great racket; argue that ebooks are like real books and you’re paying for one copy of it!)
A paper book, by contrast, can be read literally until it falls to pieces, and with a relatively moderate amount of care it’ll last for a hundred years.
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As I am desperately trying to declutter my life, the idea of empty bookshelves sounds like a wonderful dream to me. But each to their own, eh?
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And you can’t make a cosy fire out of e-readers either.
Most nights, I read aloud for my wife; it’s a good shared experience, and helps her get to sleep. This means reading in the dark, with only the reading device’s lights.
The tablet I had been using started acting up, and I switched to a kindle paperwhite instead. It was… OK, but nothing like as good as the tablet was; the UI was far more awkward, the books hadn’t converted perfectly to the kindle format, and the screen was much harder to read. Even with a careful selection of type, font size, and brightness, I’d stumble over words due to the low contrast.
Thankfully, I was able to resurrect the tablet, which has a high-resolution AMOLED screen. It’s wonderful in the dark.
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I’m still rocking a Kindle 4 (and paper books), and this is my favourite feature - slumped lazily supine, using the thumb that’s already holding the device to easily move to the next page with an almost imperceptible addition of pressure onto the considerately long buttons built into the side of the thing (on both sides, for righties and lefties).
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Moon+ Reader handles all the common formats and is surprisingly light on battery compared to, say, the kindle app (which also crashes like a bastard all. the. fucking. time.). You can dial the brightness down super-low too, which is great for bedtime reading.
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