Electronic copies of every book and a reader you actually enjoy reading books on. I was surprised to find a Blackberry phone doing a decent job of being the latter, a much better job than my laptop did—I read all the time now, whereas I have paper books by my bedside I haven’t opened in a year. YMMV, this is a highly personal thing.
I’m finding my new Nexus 7 tablet a very good book reading device. Small enough to carry in a pocket and hold with one hand, and has enough resolution and screen space to display almost any sensible PDF readable in full page view. I just gave away my older 10″ PDF reading tablet (Acer A500) after not having booted it once since getting the N7.
I moved apartment this month and didn’t bring over any paper books or a bookshelf. I doubt I will either. A single SD card is much nicer to carry around than a few bookshelves worth of books.
which kind of books you want and their intended form of reading
how often you will want to search the contents
how often you might want to refer to the contents when applicable, such as reference books
whether you have the urge to press ctrl+f whenever you want to find something in a long text
how likely you are to immediately look up the definition of a word (perhaps in another tab or window) as opposed to just keep on reading and infer from context
other stuff that’s easier to do when you’ve already got the text in electronic format and have direct access to search and lookup tools
(More seriously, I go back and forth on this. My books are some of my favorite possessions, so long as I’m not moving- but every time I move, I get that much closer to switching to a Kindle.)
Any thoughts about optimizing book ownership?
Electronic copies of every book and a reader you actually enjoy reading books on. I was surprised to find a Blackberry phone doing a decent job of being the latter, a much better job than my laptop did—I read all the time now, whereas I have paper books by my bedside I haven’t opened in a year. YMMV, this is a highly personal thing.
I’m finding my new Nexus 7 tablet a very good book reading device. Small enough to carry in a pocket and hold with one hand, and has enough resolution and screen space to display almost any sensible PDF readable in full page view. I just gave away my older 10″ PDF reading tablet (Acer A500) after not having booted it once since getting the N7.
I moved apartment this month and didn’t bring over any paper books or a bookshelf. I doubt I will either. A single SD card is much nicer to carry around than a few bookshelves worth of books.
Depends on:
whether you like reading on screens
how often you reread
how many friends you have who a) have similar tastes and b) reliably return borrowed objects
how much living space you have to work with
how convenient you are to a library
your finances, and
to what extent you enjoy books as decor.
Add also:
which kind of books you want and their intended form of reading
how often you will want to search the contents
how often you might want to refer to the contents when applicable, such as reference books
whether you have the urge to press ctrl+f whenever you want to find something in a long text
how likely you are to immediately look up the definition of a word (perhaps in another tab or window) as opposed to just keep on reading and infer from context
other stuff that’s easier to do when you’ve already got the text in electronic format and have direct access to search and lookup tools
Buy all of them.
(More seriously, I go back and forth on this. My books are some of my favorite possessions, so long as I’m not moving- but every time I move, I get that much closer to switching to a Kindle.)