Mar HicksDo you refer paper or digital books for reading nonfiction?
a libi rose@histoftech i prefer digital books for all things, but actual digital not pdf.
@histoftech i like to have physical copies to annotate, but i usually annotate the physical as i read the digital
roboticus lastius (not a bot)I prefer paper. But regularly read ebooks, and listen to audiobooks.
I just want many, many books to read and will use any mode. 🌞
Bill, organizer of stuff@histoftech I prefer paper for most long form work, but I think it's because the physicality of it helps to keep my focus...
Benjamin Geer@histoftech I used to prefer digital books, now I prefer paper, it’s better for my eyes
Norman Wilson@benjamingeer @histoftech It's gone the other way for me! Lighting and consequent iris aperture make the difference--I usually read e-books on an LED-screen tablet so lighting is easy to fix. Hoping my new glasses will make things better (but optician just called, factory botched the new lenses, so there will be a delay).
SnoopJ@histoftech usually I am fine with digital, but for any "reference" text that I might want to index into for specific material (beyond what digital highlighting can cover), I need dead trees to be a functional reader
ben@histoftech I prefer paper for anything that feels ‘reference-y’, where I might flip back and forth a lot rather than reading straight through.
Otherwise probably evenly split.
Space Hobo@histoftech I thought I was ride-or-die paper until I went to grad school for an MA a couple years back. Two huge things made me realise how important digital non-fiction documents had become.
The first is best illustrated by the first image. Horizontal four-page spreads were life-changing for me.
The second is that I could quickly grab plain text out of e-book formats. I'd name the PDFs or ePubs after the citation tag I used in BibTeX, pull out a plain-text version with the same name, and then use `ripgrep` to quickly search for half-remembered passages. The result is something like the second image.
In a hurry I could quickly drop something like `NOTE: rg -i white.heat[Hicks2017]` in my document, and follow it up at leisure when I actually worked out where I wanted to weave your take on Wilson's policies into the narrative.
Lisa Makes Stuff (she/her)@histoftech I think paper, because most of my non-fiction reading lately is either books about quilts and quilting, or books with instructions for making specific quilts.
But I *do* have other non-fiction books. :)
Jon@histoftech paper, but sometimes the ebooks are cheaper. Whatever , as long as I’m getting them from bookshop.org or the library.
Badly-read literary snob@histoftech digital for everything
Stephen I Moore@histoftech Prefer? Paper for everything
Tolerate? digital novels, and digital academic articles
Will not tolerate digital monographs.
jeremiah@histoftech paper for me.
@histoftech Depends. If it's one read and done, either is fine. If it's something I'll actually work with, I prefer paper, because it's easier and faster to keep my fingers in a few places and flip back and forth, eg overall diagram vs detail text.
Even book readers with bookmarks and quick page refreshes don't quite cut it for me.
I don't know whether this demonstrates some interface detail e-book readers don't get yet, or just something about the way my brain works, or both.
For quick reference lookups, e-books are fine if the TOC and index are sensibly designed. They aren't always in paper books either, but the way one can flip quickly through paper pages seems to help.
Amin Girasol@oclsc @histoftech your description fits for me.
I think there's something about the geography of a physical book that an e-reader cannot emulate: that key paragraph was about a third of the way through, on the right-hand page, near the bottom.
(I think I was forever turned off digital formats for reference books when I thought I was being clever bringing Lonely Planet PDFs for a travel adventure; the format was completely unusable in the field.)
AL (not Al)@histoftech I have bad eyes. I love ebooks!
DataKnightmare@histoftech
Paper. Digital books (even more so the platform-fenced ones) are the great digital failure, from the point of view of convenience, usability, technology, permanence, lending, etc.
The only thing where digital material is preferable is search, dismal as it is in ebooks.
BTW, Programmed Inequality was splendid reading
Paper. Digital books (even more so the platform-fenced ones) are the great digital failure, from the point of view of convenience, usability, technology, permanence, lending, etc.
The only thing where digital material is preferable is search, dismal as it is in ebooks.
BTW, Programmed Inequality was splendid reading