109 replies
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I recently started buying paper books.
Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.
It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.
Not sure why I am this way.
I do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus.
Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the energy and resources required to create, use, and dispose of an e-reader would be markedly higher than one would suspect, and I think people replace them more often than necessary.
Books, on the other hand, are trees. Bury 'em in your yard when you're done with them and the fungi will know what to do to recycle them.
This is not good news. I just got my first eInk reader today and first thing I did was go through all the navigation setup pages.
I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.
FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort.
Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything else to do except read my book. How much time can I spend on settings? Browsing my library? As far as brightness I leave it alone mostly and don't think about it unless it's irritatingly one way or the other.
I have no idea what "navigation setup pages" are - I've been through several different Kindles and I pretty much just take them out of the box and start reading. There's nothing to "set up" outside of logging into my Amazon account.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
Also, while I know the readership of HN skews young, but when you reach your 50s, having the ability to make the text larger in an ebook is a killer feature.
Yeah my vision is still good but farsighted so need low-strength reading glasses, larger fonts, or what I've started doing with this eReader is just getting good at reading fuzzy letters with a relaxed gaze at less than arms length. It's actually less straining than trying to force focusing closer than is comfortable.
I tried using landscape mode or larger fonts but didn't like the extra page scrolling/turning. Eventually I suppose we'll get lightweight and normal looking AR glasses for reading eBooks.
Thanks (everyone) for the replies and different viewpoints.
I already went through all the setup menus, including messing with fonts, layouts, making some collection/folders, and downloading some samples to preview.
So far it all seems pretty good. I don't think I'll be too distracted by it. The 7" screen is a tad small, but I really do like the size and weight so will keep it. Anything larger/heavier will likely not be kept on my person so loses a lot of use.
Another great use I just discovered is loading it with pdf's of all my device/appliance/toys manuals in a User Manuals collection.
Chiming in with the others to say that my experience with e-readers has been great. Physical books can grow to be a huge burden over the years.
For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word.
I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is lost when using an e-reader, but for me it's well worth the trade-off for the the portability and space saved.
Also consider that often, people who are expressing skepticism of digital reading have only ever tried it on laptops and iPads, which is a very different (more distracting) experience from an e-ink reader.
Another massive advantage to using Kindle estead of iPad - enourmous battery life. My like 6-8 year old Kindle survives what feels like a month without recharge with active use. This enables you to just drop it in your backpack and be sure that it works the next time you feel like reading.
FWIW I got a Kindle in 2010 for a trip and found that I really liked it.
I also wound up inadvertently encouraging other people to get them.
Only one person out of about 6 who got them after I got them didn't use them. She didn't actually read much.
Everybody's different! I prefer to read on paper, I know many other people who prefer to read on their kindle. Whatever works for you is the right answer for you!
I still use ebooks when I travel - I'll usually have one or two actual physical books with me, but I'll also have a few loaded up on my iPad in case I get bored or finish them early.
A lot of the posts here are just individuals' opinions, not universal experiences. Yours may well be different!
Personally, I carry an e-ink reader everywhere and read it every time I get a spare minute or so. It's done wonders for my reading habits. And unlike this topic's creator, I basically set the font and formatting once and almost never mess with them again.
Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.
With paper books I'm more concerned with having to have space to put it when I'm done. But, I find it more enjoyable to read a physical book, and am more likely to re-read it.
Another nice thing about paper books is that you can lend them out to your friends when you're finished reading them. This saves a bit of space, plus your friends can just pick them up and read them without worrying about a bunch of BS like whether it's compatible with their e-reader, if the DRM will work, if the publisher will revoke the rights for some reason, etc.
Or give them away, or leave them in a little free library for someone else to enjoy. In my old neighborhood somebody else had similar taste in scifi and (as far as I could tell) we traded Asimov books back and forth through the book box in the park!
I'd love to keep them all forever but (a) I think my house is about maxed out on shelves and (b) a book's potential is wasted on the shelf.
Get the ebook for archival purpose and ditch the paper book when you’re done with your first read through.
If you later find out you want the paper book as home ornament, then spend a little extra to decorate your home.
The two major mistakes we make about books is:
1) we think we have to finish it. No, drop it if it’s boring.
2) we think we have to keep it around. No. Take a picture and write a few notes for your personal blog if you need to keep track. You don’t need it in your room or house.
Sell them 2nd hand. I mainly buy 2nd hand and sell 2nd hand.
If I cannot/need not re-read a book, I could get rid of it and have more space. Tho the gain feel very tiny compared to the rest of the hoarded stuff.
The undeniable minus of a Kindle e-reader is: the illustrations suck. They're just too small. Half the time, my "library" has book covers that I can't even make out.
That's why a retina display ipad is now my preferred reader.
Yeah, I've owned a e-paper Kindle for a decade but probably never finished reading a book on it. Instead I use a iPad 11 or mini, which are superior in every way (that I care about) except reading in sunshine. I love how lightweight the Kindle is, but not its small reading area or lack of color or weak illumination. Or its inability to serve any task other than reading ebooks.
Yeah, I have a nice Galaxy tab for a mix of art and ebook reading.
I slightly prefer physical books and still collect them, but a tablet lets carry dozens on the road
The older I get the less I trust myself to know how to administer or even to care how to work any current or future reading e-device.
A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency!
I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.
When I'm on vacation, I always read paper books.
Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock)
Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden.
Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopamine baseline / memory, but that's just suspicion from having lived pre-smartphone.
PS: Also, re: environmental impact. eBay and Amazon sell tons of used books. Sure you're shipping them around, but I really buy new these days.
You forgot the third and fourth failure modes: weight and bag space. Books take a lot of it. An e-reader is thinner than any book and weighs the same no matter how many it's holding.
I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
Considering you're on HN, it's likely a safe bet to say you also travel with a laptop. In which case, an e-reader is still a waste of space because your laptop can just open ebooks too. Or if you don't, then your phone is still a better space saver for reading books with. Yet, you will likely prefer to take your e-reader with anyway (and its charger if it isn't the same as other devices).
This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.
My laptop and phone can't last through a long-haul flight. My e-reader doesn't need charging until I come home, fits in a jeans pocket and is a similar weight to my passport.
That's kind of my point - your preferences are to the advantage of the e-reader. For others, the same might apply to physical books instead, despite the disadvantage of bulk.
The ergonomics on any laptop is dogshit compared to a dedicated e-ink reader. Just the amount of brightness the display beams to your face makes it suboptimal for reading in low light.
And the "charger" I need with my ancient Kindle is a standard micro-USB cable, not exactly exotic. And as soon as this one breaks down, the next one will be USB-C like a good 90%+ of my devices I travel with.
Of course it's a relative argument. Everything is.
I don't personally travel with a laptop unless I plan on working remote. Too heavy/bulky and more importantly, you need to take them out going through TSA. The e-reader doesn't need a charger for the 2-4 weeks I usually travel. If I'm traveling longer, I'll bring a single additional USB cable (that will go away the next time I upgrade).
A phone doesn't take bag space because it's always in my pocket, but it's significantly less ergonomic and much less power efficient for reading. The value-add of being able to read without draining battery on my most important travel tool is worth it on its own.
I'm just the opposite. One of the worst things about vacations was having to carry along all those books or take a detour to a bookstore (if there were any) to buy more. Now I just carry a single small e-reader. It's a great savings in terms of cargo space.
I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.
E-readers are often very simple devices. Their main audience is older people.
Light being a dependency of reading a printed book is one of the biggest plus for e-ink readers. You don't need light, they already come with it! It's so much easier reading with a Kindle (in dark mode) at bed time than it is a paper book.
Well, yes and no.. I do use the backlight on my Kindle if it's dark, but this changes how it looks. I have a Paperwhite Kindle. With the backlight on it's more like reading on LCD, though not as bad. The Kindle looks much nicer if I can use a bedside lamp instead of the backlight, just as I would with a paper book.
You still can't turn off the light on a Kindle completely can you? Always felt like a waste of battery on a beach...
There's a tiny amount of light, yes. I don't know why Amazon made it that way. It's not really visible.. not to me, at least. But it's probably one reason the battery is slowly drained, over weeks, even if not in use.
It does turn off when you're not using the kindle. But you can't turn it completely off while reading.
I suppose the use case is picking up the kindle at night in a dark room while you disabled the light when you were reading outside during the day.
If you put it in / out of sleep mode juuuust right, you can trigger a bug (race condition?) where it doesn't turn the backlight on.
And when you read lying on your side, no awkward holding for the nearside pages!
The older I get, the more I appreciate being able to select a larger font with my Kindle. I love books, but the accessibility features of a modern ereader are pretty great too.
I've been putting off glasses for as long as I can. I suspect I'll return to my Kindle again in the future for this reason. It's good to be reminded that both things can coexist.
The ability to select a font size I like is one of my main three reasons for using a Kindle.
I read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble.
I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult.
Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances.
But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
WTF is "deep reading?"
It's likely some arbitrary jargon that someone made up. I have my own method of reading, which since we're throwing out pretentious flowery prose, I'm going to call "predictive perusal".
For each chapter or titled section, I read the first sentence or title and then mentally position myself as the writer of that section and attempt to predict the contents. For convergence I attempt to traverse further plies. For divergence, I attempt to figure out the root of the difference.
EDIT: For the record, I have never felt the need to scribble in the margins of a book. It's far better to take notes on separate media to prevent "preloading" your existing thoughts at the time should you choose to re-read the book years later.
This link will help you understand: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=deep%20reading
You can take a similar approach for other words and phrases you don't know, too!
Looks like you don't read books for entertainment?
I believe the original article wasn't about technical/self improvement etc books.
I do read for entertainment, but I’m talking about reading to learn (very common use case) rather than reading fiction.
I don’t take notes when I’m reading fiction like “A Man Called Ove”. But I do take notes and flip back and forth when I’m reading say Girard.
I truly don’t mean to be pedantic, but there’s a giant implicit “for me” in there. I do not want or need to scribble or write in my books for “deep reading”. It’s totally fine if you want to, but that’s your preference and not a general requirement everyone has.
I just finished “Moby Dick” on a Kobo. It’s no “Ulysses”, thank heavens, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it as a long romance or a beach read.
I think Moby Dick is a romance. I guess the term is confusing in English because people think “love story” but an older use of the word just means a novel with adventure, chivalric elements.
There is also a giant implicit “for me” in your preference. It just happens that your preference happens to be one that is mainstream. A lot of types of reading are not linear —- for instance, if you have to read to write a book report, you have to go back, make notes, flip back and forth. A straight through reading will not produce a good book report.
I read non-fiction and also great books (of the western canon) and in order to really read to understand, I need to flip back and forth and take notes and engage with the text. My reading instructor always tells me, “good reading is re-reading.” Single pass reading works for entertainment reading, but not for deep reading. (By deep reading, I mean the kind of reading that is taught in Mortimer Adler’s book referenced above)
For deep reading you have to interact with the text, most commonly by debating with it in the margins. This is pretty standard for academic reading (say when taking a humanities or literature class). It’s a pretty common use case that eReaders don’t support.
This is interesting, I'm pretty much the opposite. I only read paper books if there are no electronic versions available.
Fiction I read on a Kindle.
My deep reading all happens on a PC actually. Not even a tablet. I find it much easier to highlight and annotate reading material with mouse and keyboard and look up references with a proper multi-window screen.
Also, while you certainly can underline and write notes on paper, this information then stays on paper and in this book. No way to index it easily, no way to cross-reference etc.
While you can scribble, you can easily highlight and comment on books. Going back and forth is maybe slightly harder than a book, but it isn't "so difficult." I'm not saying reading on a Kindle is better than a paper book. But I didn't think it is as bad s you claim it is. I personally like it because I can read anywhere. I don't need to carry a large heavy book around.
Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.
I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.
Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital
A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.
It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.
It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through.
Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.
While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it. I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.
My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.
Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.
I prefer PDFs for informative material (various documentation), though they're less useful if it's just a photocopied old manual (no OCR).
It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.
I classify skimming as a "distracting" activity. I always ask myself: What information do I need? And then it's very easy to get to the relevant passage. And outlines are there for a reason (PDF Expert can edit them) so navigating between the same file is not that cumbersome for me. I do agree that the experience is more pleasant with a paper book, but in a focused session, the result is pretty much the same.
Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.
That's a software choice issue. You can definitely flip through digital texts more easily than physical. With a decent monitor, you can flip through multiple books at the same time which is quite difficult to do with physical books, assuming you haven't summoned eldritch appendages to help.
Another nice benefit of paper is that the company that sold it can't just bust down your door, steal the book, drop off a few bucks, and then go back along their merry way. Amazon did exactly this with, amongst other books, 1984. Such a perfectly appropriate book.
I don't think they can do that with my calibre, and calibre-web collection lol.
But if you accidentally exposed your calibre-web online, they may be able to DMCA you?
If someone a) finds my calibre-web installation on the public internet b) manages to crack my username and password to log in c) scan the contents d) notify the correct rights holders e) send a subpoena for pirating content
...they can get my money.
None of my ebooks are infected with DRM. Lots of online stores will sell you ebooks without that nonsense.
And if they won't, there are ways to pay for a copy (in whatever way most benefits the author), and then then get your DRM-free copy.
You've got to wonder what the hapless Amazon employee asked to implement this felt, and how much leeway they had in which book for that to happen to first.
I expect it's all on George Orwell. Numbers sort before letters.
I am kind of the opposite; I have found it much easier to read on Kindle simply because I can make the text as big as I want.
In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me.
Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it.
I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me.
Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.
Didn't you say you're 13 years older than last time?
From a “ability to comprehend it” level, I don’t think that that matters all that much. 16 year old me could read just fine.
Yes, surely the only reason you'd dislike something at 14-18 years old and like it at 27-31 is the font size.
I take it your tastes have otherwise been immutable in that time period, and that you listen to the same music, follow the same fashion trends etc. as you did back then?
I didn’t say that they were immutable, but from a comprehension level I don’t think that things have changed substantially. Is it really controversial that bigger fonts are easier for me to read?
I thought I made that pretty clear, that it was that I was having trouble parsing and understanding the small text.
ETA:
Also, lol, my tastes in music really hasn’t changed either. Looking at my YouTube music history, the last 40 songs I listened to were ones I listened to in high school. I also wear more or less the style clothes; I still have of the shirts I wore back then actually.
Note that only having a certain chunk of text on the screen at one time may be a variable as well as the age/life-place difference as others have so politely hinted at.
This and the fact that the kindle is _exactly_ where I left it, no need for physical bookmarks.
I use my iPad and my Kobo for digital reading. I have paper version of "important" books (stuff I'd like to read if I don't have power), but some are unwieldy (Algorithms by Cormen et Al).
I prefer e-ink for reading, but it's too slow for my learning workflow. I highlight and mark interesting stuff, that I export later to condense and reflect upon. And that is cumbersome on an e-reader. There's also the matter of size. I generally like the PDF version of technical books as they're typeset well, but my e-reader is too small for them. So I use my iPad for those (Distraction is handled by the fact that I read those in short focused sessions).
But for fiction books, the e-reader is perfect. I don't highlight text in those books, I just read. Any other operation is slow enough that I just can't fiddle with it. And it's perfect for long sessions of reading as it does not project light in my eyes. It's light, so I just bring it with me everywhere.
I recommend the Fujitsu Quaderno. Great for marking up textbooks on A4 size pages, and far lighter than a book itself.
Will you be able to read those textbooks and markups in 10 or 20 years, if Fujitsu stops making Quadernos?
An Apple-esque expensive stuff. (A pen sheath, $32.)
On top of all of that, nobody's going to revise the book out from under me while I'm reading it, or prevent me from loaning it to a friend, or even yanking it entirely from my device.
Let me introduce you to two of my best friends: Airplane Mode and USB cable.
As far as I know (in the sense that I've never experienced anything like it in a decade of using a Kindle) that the book's getting revised from under me while I'm reading it. There's an occasional update for some books, but I have to actively choose to download the updated version, otherwise my original stays the same. I think I've only downloaded an updated version a single time.
Reading ebooks doesn't mean submitting to Amazon's ecosystem.
I have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.
Well you can get the cover art, but yeah. I mean you can get the differing font faces and etc. if the publisher built that into the file, but most don't go to that amount of effort on their e-books.
I feel this strongly. Physical books make a deeper impression in my memory. There are all sorts of particularities of how the book was bound: it's size, it's smell, the texture of the paper, etc. It's like the book exists in its own unique space (vs all digital books existing in the single shared space of my computer/reader). I think a book's reading environment loses some richness when all these subtle little details are homogenized.
Same here. I'm not sure if it's psychological. When reading my Kindle, I have to constantly fight my urge to do something else, maybe except for reading a page-turner novel.
That's exactly why I get paper books. An e-reader is too much like a smartphone and I start circling the UI looking for distractions.
Who cares about the ecological impact of buying a book?
You have missed the forest for the trees.
exact opposite for me - the more i got into ebooks, the harder i found it to handle the ergonomics of paper books, and today my reading is pretty much 100% on my phone or kindle.
As if food packaging is particulary ecological, but we continue to order food, eat takeaway and processed food reliant on packaging.
I also buy paper books. Cheap paperback ones.
Books can easily be recycled as opposed to food packaging which mostly ends up in landfills or litters the environment.
Same. I recently got one of these wirecutter book lights: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/glocusent-reading... Does an amber color for bedtime reading, and now I' tearing through books again. It's so much easier to skim, skip, re-find something (yes, even without fancy search) and I just find myself reading faster with real books again. It's rekindled :) a love of books again I feel like I lost somehow only doing it on e-readers.
It's also more ... social perhaps. I'm reading a book that an uncle bought, but never really got around to reading. I would have never picked up that book myself, but he brought it over an I stuck it in the bookshelf.
Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal.
There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though.
I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.
Paper is probably not the place you are going to be able to make your most significant marginal impact.
I found that I change the font size/lighting depending on time of day, which is harder to do with a paper book :)
Yes, there's a strange habit with things we can twiddle and the surface area for twiddling physical books is much more limited and less engaging than with electronic devices.
There's something to dedicated physical entities being single purpose and dead end that allows them to serve you in a very focused manner. Things with more bells and whistles, knobs and pulls will simply draw you into their twiddling even when it serves no purpose. It's like working with these things creates an itch that we need to scratch and it is distracting even if the recovery for focus for those things is minimal, it all adds up and gets you out of the focus state.
I've been buying used books from local booksellers and betterworldbooks.com when I can't find them locally.
Seems like a fair compromise to me re: ecological impact.
This was my opinion until I got the Kindle Scribe, turns out the Kindle was too damn small
What goes on in your head that you even consider the "ecologicity" of a book. It has no impact. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Stop feeling guilty about meaningless things.
I'm the opposite. I stopped reading books because I was accumulating too many and it was difficult to find the ones I like without paying full price for new copies (which I'd eventually just discard). Also I find them cumbersome. Now I have a Kobo I read a lot. I can read on my side in bed. It's great.
However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.
I haven't had much trouble focusing on reading on computers, my only expectation is for the device to be touch screen and a pressure sensitive pen. The touch screen makes moving through pages trivial (for casual reading on say, my kindle, I have the habit of laying back and just tapping with my nose to flip pages lol) and the pen makes it trivial to mark up more serious reading material. With paper books I tend to not be near them right when I need them, and tend to be too wary of just marking them up. With digital stuff, and all the syncing we have between devices these days, I pretty much always have multiple devices at hand where the material is accessible.
I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.
Yes plus the emotion of sitting on a couch with a paper book vs. a device is very different. The feeling of flicking pages is better than the UI of book readers or smart phones.
Honestly it is likely more ecological than ebooks after you factor in everything. Think about how many e-readers are sitting in the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Screens, batteries, plastic shells. The energy to not only power the device but all of the infrastructure for transmitting and storing the book.
> Yes, it's not particularly ecological
If it makes you feel better, just think of your bookshelf as a carbon sequestration facility.
These sound like common traits for ADHDers.
I prefer to read paper books, but there are three reasons I generally don't. a) Font size is getting too small for me. Years ago I changed to large hardcover (sometimes large but softcover) versions instead of the smaller-sized books I used to buy, simply because the fonts are larger then. With the Kindle I can set the font size to what I want. b) Weight and size. I read on airplanes, in hotels etc. I read a lot and I read fast, so I bring more than one book (and even that is too big and heavy, see a). The Kindle is king here. c) Storage. I don't have enough room for more books at home. I've sadly had to dump lots and lots and lots of books, even though I like to read the same books again (and again). Tried to sort out those most unlikely to get re-read, but.. I can't even give them away. Used-book stores have more than they can handle.
As to the Kindle - I've never felt any urge to tinker with anything, except when I'm forced to: I set the font size, that's one single operation, forget it (at least for that book). If I occasionally read at night I have to add some backlight. And that's about it. I just read.
What I miss about paper books is the nice cover (color..), how easy it is to "see" the book (bookmarks, flip it open somewhere else and so on). In addition to actually reading it. But the Kindle is actually very nice to read (unlike phones, PC monitors, tablets, all of that. I can't ready more than a couple of paragraphs on LCD displays)
Last Saturday I went to the bookstore, bought a paperback novel, and then went home and started reading it right away. It felt great and it reminded me of doing this in the past as I used to do this a lot in the past, but for some reason I had stopped.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts now, and that really cuts into my book reading. But nothing beats sitting down in the sun and reading a good paperback.
Paper is a carbon sink. As long as you don't burn them, the carbon will stay in the book.