I launched a project this week to replace [physical books] with digital versions which is moving at a decent rate of ten shelves a day.
Some questions, for anyone who uses digital books a lot: what readers—both hardware and software—do you recommend, and why? What determines whether you obtain a book on paper or as bits? Do you find the usability problems I list below?
I don’t have an e-reader, although I do have computers and the Mac Kindle application. But I’ve never bought an e-book, because the convenience of a book that takes up no space has not yet outweighed the problems I see with them, even though the space that paper books take up is a major problem for me.
An e-book can vanish into thin air if the publisher decides to un-publish it. This has actually happened.
All the other obvious DRM issues.
I can’t easily consult half a dozen books at once.
I can’t flip through an e-book with anything like the convenience of a physical book.
Until we get A3-sized Retina screens the visual bandwidth will be nothing like as great as with paper.
The paper format has a record of compatibility of many times the entire history of computing. I have books that were manufactured more than a century ago, and they’re as readable as when they came off the press.
I’ve seen enough people’s accounts of dreadful usability problems in the reading software to conclude that most of it is written by dolts.
I used to print out scientific papers for reading, but I stopped that some years ago and only print them now when there’s something I need to study intensively, at which point most of those usability considerations kick in. At this point, I can’t see myself buying e-books except for the sort of mid-list SF where I would drop the physical book in a charity bin after reading.
I keep all of my books as PDFs on Mendeley. If a PDF is not available, I buy a hard copy through Amazon and send it to 1DollarScan to be converted to a scanned PDF.
I can’t easily consult half a dozen [e]books at once.
In terms of screen estate, I agree, but in terms of looking for something in textbooks, I find it much easier to consult multiple ebooks at once, since I can easily search through tens of them in a second.
Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain.
Pictures?
Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form?
I don’t know. I shall check.
ETA: I have checked. Of the last 30 books I bought (a number decided by “ok, that’s enough”), 13 are available as e-books (determined by looking them up on Amazon). Every book in the sample published since 2010 was available on Kindle; only two books published before then were (2002 and 2006).
VincentYu mentioned 1DollarScan, a service for (destructively) scanning books to PDF, but transatlantic shipping costs for a thousand books, plus scanning at $3 per book make it rather expensive for me to make a serious dent in my book stacks.
Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.
That’s a large presumption. Electronic documents easily die of obsolescing formats. “If it doesn’t survive, it wasn’t important” is not a good rule—ask any historian.
Pictures and graphs generally work fine on newer works but I find that charts can be pretty badly optimized on older works that have been adapted cheaply. I read comics on my iPhone but the comics app is much more optimized for this than ereaders are.
Try k2pdfopt! I use it all of the time with scientific papers, with lots of formulas, and it works quite well. It practically converts the pdf to images and slices them up, outputting another pdf, but the size increase is not too significant (still usable file sizes with multiple-hundred page long books).
Steven_Bukal writes:
Some questions, for anyone who uses digital books a lot: what readers—both hardware and software—do you recommend, and why? What determines whether you obtain a book on paper or as bits? Do you find the usability problems I list below?
I don’t have an e-reader, although I do have computers and the Mac Kindle application. But I’ve never bought an e-book, because the convenience of a book that takes up no space has not yet outweighed the problems I see with them, even though the space that paper books take up is a major problem for me.
An e-book can vanish into thin air if the publisher decides to un-publish it. This has actually happened.
All the other obvious DRM issues.
I can’t easily consult half a dozen books at once.
I can’t flip through an e-book with anything like the convenience of a physical book.
Until we get A3-sized Retina screens the visual bandwidth will be nothing like as great as with paper.
The paper format has a record of compatibility of many times the entire history of computing. I have books that were manufactured more than a century ago, and they’re as readable as when they came off the press.
I’ve seen enough people’s accounts of dreadful usability problems in the reading software to conclude that most of it is written by dolts.
I used to print out scientific papers for reading, but I stopped that some years ago and only print them now when there’s something I need to study intensively, at which point most of those usability considerations kick in. At this point, I can’t see myself buying e-books except for the sort of mid-list SF where I would drop the physical book in a charity bin after reading.
I keep all of my books as PDFs on Mendeley. If a PDF is not available, I buy a hard copy through Amazon and send it to 1DollarScan to be converted to a scanned PDF.
In terms of screen estate, I agree, but in terms of looking for something in textbooks, I find it much easier to consult multiple ebooks at once, since I can easily search through tens of them in a second.
DRM issues: download an unencrypted backup copy, or de-RM your own.
Search: use desktop search that indexes unencrypted books.
Flip through, multi-open: yeah, it’s a problem. Especially for scientific papers.
Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain. Also, audiobooks for driving.
Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form? Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.
Personally, I don’t buy physical books anymore, though I so have a (small) library where some old books would be hard to find online.
Pictures?
I don’t know. I shall check.
ETA: I have checked. Of the last 30 books I bought (a number decided by “ok, that’s enough”), 13 are available as e-books (determined by looking them up on Amazon). Every book in the sample published since 2010 was available on Kindle; only two books published before then were (2002 and 2006).
VincentYu mentioned 1DollarScan, a service for (destructively) scanning books to PDF, but transatlantic shipping costs for a thousand books, plus scanning at $3 per book make it rather expensive for me to make a serious dent in my book stacks.
That’s a large presumption. Electronic documents easily die of obsolescing formats. “If it doesn’t survive, it wasn’t important” is not a good rule—ask any historian.
Pictures and graphs generally work fine on newer works but I find that charts can be pretty badly optimized on older works that have been adapted cheaply. I read comics on my iPhone but the comics app is much more optimized for this than ereaders are.
Try k2pdfopt! I use it all of the time with scientific papers, with lots of formulas, and it works quite well. It practically converts the pdf to images and slices them up, outputting another pdf, but the size increase is not too significant (still usable file sizes with multiple-hundred page long books).
Thanks! This isn’t actually useful to me since I read almost nothing really hardcore on my phone but it’s good to know about.
What about them?
I’m wondering if this has been studied.