Digital or Physical Book?

When In Rome

         

Was listening to this on the radio anyway and it appeared on my timeline. I wasn't sure I believed that a child would be doing that, not knowing to flick the page of a book but attempting to swipe it instead; or are the teachers lying / if they are, why would they?

Raises some questions doesn't it. I made the effort recently of going to the library and taking out five novels, none of which I ended up reading sadly. Practically eveything we seem to do reading-wise seems to be electronic OR is it the case that you still read books rather than access literature on a Kindle or download an audio book?

drhcnip

as a teacher for the last 25-ish years, never seen evidence of this despite having heard it alleged before - children are less likely to be interested in reading than they have been but there's no conflation of physical/digital reading habits...

as a reader, i read the occasional kindle/ebook but only 2 or 3 a year - i much prefer a real' book, reading about 70-80 of those a year...my wife reads far more digitally than i do but we're both still more likely to buy physically, we just like having 100s of the buggers around the house...

Bl4ckGryph0n

I’ve tried, and love my technology otherwise, but I guess I haven’t tried hard enough. It’s still books for me.

CooperUK

Kindle for me - mainly down to storage space as I was starting to fill the house with books.

rancidpunk

I still do a bit of both. Every know and then I'll pick up a book that grabs my eye and isn't already on my Kindle.

I can well believe the swiping pages thing though. Probably more from autopilot than not knowing as I did similar with a blu ray cover before, finding myself trying to pinch to zoom; before realising what I was actually holding!

dtobin

Kindle and audiobooks all the way for me. Bookshelves full of old paper books but haven't bought a new one in quite a while.

The wife and kids on the other hand still prefer the real thing.

DPinBucks

We bought Kindles a few years ago, and going back to paper books seems like a step into the dark ages.  Our house is still cluttered with over 1,000 books, and we now have 600  on Kindles. I love the new Paperwhite, which replaced my old keyboard device last year.

My granddaughter, now aged 9, became an avid reader of paper books from about aged 5.  She too now has a Kindle, which she loves.  Her parents thought it a good idea to start her reading paper books for a few years, to get used to them (many books, especially children's, don't work well on Kindles).

To me, their main advantages, as well as being as easy to use as paper, are: their lightness; ability to carry a whole library around (no more carry-ons stuffed with books for the flight); ability to buy a book and start reading it within a couple of minutes; and book price.  Most e-books are at least a pound or two cheaper than the paper version, and Kindles easily pay for themselves over a year or two.

It occurs to me to wonder about this swiping motion supposedly reported (I'm a bit sceptical about it, too).  Isn't that a perfectly good way of turning a page?  Well, perhaps not perfectly good, as it tends to crease the paper, but I've seen many people do it.

nheather

For me

Non-Fiction - Physical Book
Fiction - Audiobook Unabridged (get through loads), but use Kindle on holiday which is about the only time I read non-fiction - then it is Kindle rather than cart 5 or more books in the luggage.

As a technology eReaders are still a bit of an enigma to me.  One of their claims is that they can hold thousands of books, which is certainly true.  But in reality that is not viable because none of them offer a sensible organisation mechanism.  They are all flat file (even though the underlying structure can be built in folders) with just tags - so it is not really possible to do things like Fantasy > Pratchett > Discworld > Tiffany Aching

You can do some inventive things with TAGS and COLLECTIONS but ultimately if you really had 10,000 books you would be browsing through many pages of listings to find the one you want.

The other thing I don't like is that if you have a series of books, say the "Song of Ice and Fire" (A Game of Thrones for those that just watch the TV series) in a Collection, it is not possible to order them.  So when you finish, "A Game of Thrones" it is not clear that the next one you should read is "A Clash of Kings".  I end up using the Calibre application (which I thoroughly recommend) to modify the displayed title to include the book number.

So for me, great for holding a small number of books which I clear down once I have read them but I can't get my head round using it to hold hundreds or thousands of books - don't see the point of having so much storage memory, other than it is cheap and it is a marketing gimmick.

I've read that sales of physical books have been rising whilst sales of eBooks has been falling.  It would be very interesting to see just how popular eReaders would become if you actually had to buy the eBooks.  

Cheers,

Nigel

imightbewrong

I'm not really into those old paper movies but my kids and swmbo have always got their noses in their kindles.

DaveBhoy

I do both. Kindle for traveling and commuting, but will also pick up a paperback if I'm at home.

A paperback is invaluable when it comes to keeping a table in a cafe/bar if I go for a refill - wouldn't leave a Kindle lying.