It’s a serious issue even if you “just” like scifi. The amount of books my dad and I have from second hand bookshops, that are not available in digital form, is staggering.
At the end of the day, I prefer paper books for home, and the kindle for travel. I generally don’t see why one would have to decide for one or the other exclusively.
You want an ebook? I can get you an ebook, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you an ebook by 3 o’clock this afternoon … without DRM.
i dont know about a nose, but i broke my last e-reader by falling asleep on it. ( so sad! ) ive really liked how portable they are, but after breaking two in two months, i’m back to books.
I ditched my several thousand volume book collection 10 years ago, keeping just the art books and a few that had sentimental value.
I loved my books, but I love my smart phone with 7,000 DRM free ebooks on it even better.
And there are plenty of books and other texts available only digitally. This is why the author himself reads both digital books, and real books. It’s why I do. I really don’t see why there needs to be an argument for either/or, as already mentioned.
Quoted for truth. I’ve cut down significantly over the years, but I still feel most at home around books.
However, I may become a convert, at least for the read-once-and-done books as mentioned by others: when you start out with very bad nearsightedness and then develop the need for reading glasses as well, the ability to embiggen text by zooming starts making a lot of sense.
How large is your screen?
A horrible, horrible event that is bordering on the removal of one’s arm or leg. My condolences for your soon-to-be loss.
This is not a new thought, but for the way we currently live, the electronic will outshine the tangible in the near term but not for long. I think libraries are doing great work at promoting device-neutral reading to keep everyone reading regardless of how they accomplish that task, but they still offer big, beautiful books. They’re heavy, glossy, and tangible, among many other things, and some will offer wonderful tactile stimulation (I’ve got a copy of one of Tufte’s works, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and it’s a work of art on numerous levels for me), so I think the tangible book will become more varied and intricate, like illuminated texts even though they’re still highly functional items.
I have a Galaxy Note 2 – screen size is 5.5"
I also went with the Galaxy Note 2 because of the S-Pen. One of my frustrations with other ereaders was not being able to do annotations and highlighting, but the S-Pen works great for that.
Ah. I was imagining a 4 inch screen,
Having just moved around 50,000 books, I face the same dilemma Ms. Grant and several posters describe. In a shortish time, my Kindle has accumulated around 1000 books; it is a comfortable convenience for light reading.
But.
I second the concerns about ownership, and add two major ones from my own needs and experience.
First is the constantly changing functionality across time and across devices for categorizing books. A carefully constructed categorization of 900 books that could be synchronized between keyboard Kindles and the PC app is not supported under Windows 8.1. There is no way to categorize books under the Windows 8.1 Kindle app. The PC android has a categorization feature, but it can’t be shared with the Keyboard or Paperwhite Kindle. And last I looked, the Cloud categorization didn’t talk to devices.
Second, and equally dysfunctional, is the straightjacket of the kindle file format. The wonderful advantage of searchability of both texts and personal notations of eprint is severely hampered by the nonportable format. When I research a topic, I may have up to several thousand legally acquired journal articles combined into one huge pdf file, and/or categorized in EndNote or Reference Manager. This is a huge time saver. When I first bought my Kindle, I was able to save in .pdf format–another functionality that has been removed. Calibre looks attractive, but last I looked appeared to be maintained by an individual. Given the lability of operating systems and applications, what works now may not work should the mortal Calibrettist move on.
A nice toy for light reading, but not, I think, meant for optimal and management of the information leased through the devices and apps.
Thanks for the vent, and welcome any corrections–I am weary of chasing for workarounds of this promising, crippled product.
Part of the problem is that there are lots of books, especially if you’re an historian or literary critic that aren’t digital. I wouldn’t be opposed to digitizing library collections, but sometimes, physical copies can tell you things a digitized version can’t (meaning, not scans of the page, but just a version that is digital, if you know what I mean by that…). For my field that might really matter.
But I agree we don’t have to be either/or. I think there is a fear that the digital is pushing out the physical, though.
Calibre is open source, written in a very portable way, and is becoming central enough to personal libraries that I have absolutely no concern about the ability of the community to pick up maintenance or fork it as needed. It’s not like it stores books in yet another proprietary format, nor will it disappear from the web, ever. It doesn’t lock you into the projects viewer, either. Linux distributions are already doing their own builds of the thing, so if Goyal moves on there are already people able to keep it alive.
Well, yes, it has already been mentioned several times, and I have already agreed, that not all books are available digitized – and, as I mentioned, now there ARE plenty of books (mostly fiction, but no less important, imo) that are not available in physical form… This is why it shouldn’t be an either/or situation, as I’ve already explained pretty well, I think.
There is a fear, but is it rooted in fact?
I put all of my books into a variety of “collections,” which are basically tags, using my Kindle Paperwhite (and the previous generation). These synch to new devices.
Ownership has been addressed in this thread. Remove the DRM and store them locally in Calibre (or just a directory).
A bunch of us genealogists were just talking about how often, after searching multiple sites, we still ultimately end up having to go to the city/county/state office of record to see the actual document because records which have been microfiched or digitized are often only partly readable or transcribed, and what can be most important on the page might be the marginalia, or what was written on a blank that is normally not transcribed because it’s not considered pertinent.
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