I mean, books deteriorate, a file can be copied and backed up. There’s no doubt DRM-Free Ebooks are superior, right? Is there anything I’m missing?
Wouldn’t say always better but as long as there will be e-readers and you get accustomed to them I say yes they are better…
As far as DRM-free…you certainly will not get as good a selection (even though I dislike DRM and PDF)
It depends on the book.
One of my favorite books is Good Omens (obligatory fuck Neil Gaiman). I have multiple print copies of various editions. I have multiple digital copies. The digital copies all suck because the footnotes, which are arguably the best parts of the book, are always at the end of the book rather than at the bottom of the pages. I also love to read Good Omens by picking up a copy, opening to a random page, and begin reading there.
I also read a lot of TTRPG books, I read digital copies in bed on my iPad. For actual game I always prefer a physical copy.
I also have a copy of a 200+ year old catechism book from my family.
Formatting error? Ereaders have shown footnotes in floating tooltips for a very long while. I recently read annotated Frankenstein and I read all the footnotes along with the main text with no issue.
Why not both? I download any physical book I read for my digital library. Nice tracker of what I’ve read too.
‘Better’ is a subjective judgement - for me the answer is absolutely not, I’ll always prefer a real physical book.
For others the answer will be yes, and for yet others it’ll be maybe or sometimes.
There’s no objectively true answer to the question though.
Digital media deteriorates too, it can be corrupted subtly or obviously and it can fail catastrophically. Backups and archival especially over the very long term are not simple or straightforward, it’s easy to make mistakes and for accidents to happen and a broken link in the chain can lead to the failure of the whole chain.
“Defense in depth” is a good principle to rely on here. Digitization of physical media media makes sense and the risks are on the whole probably easier to avoid since keeping multitudes of digital copies is logisticially trivial compared to making physical copies. But that doesn’t mean it’s without risks, and may fail against risks that a physical copy wouldn’t. Both is better than either one, and either one is better than none.
No. In fact, I’d say hardly ever.
We have books that are thousands of years old. Without explicitly copying and translating formats, media, etc., I wouldn’t count on any digital format to survive more than a century - and probably be undecipherable at the end of it anyway. Some scholars have suggested that we’re in the midst of what will be a digital dark age because of this very reason.
Let’s also consider the sort of degradation that can creep in. I’ve got a 110 year old document I’m deciphering at the moment, and there are parts of letters where the ink has faded or the paper has torn. I can usually make out from the remaining bits what the letter should be. You’ve probably done this on old letters: "Is that an ‘a’ or an ‘o’? On the other hand, if I have a lower-case f in UTF-32, its binary representation is “00000000000000000000000001100110.” If I have minor data corruption, one or more of those bits will flip (1–>0 or 0–>1). Since it could be anywhere in the sequence, I could end up with something totally unrelated to an ‘f’ either in character shape or alphabetic proximity.
Then there’s the reading, indexing, and searching abilities in a physical book - no “add a bookmark” feature compares to sticking a finger on the page you want to flip back to, or comparing a few pages side-by-side. Physical bookmarks, stickies, or earmarking (noooo!) are all ways that people reference books which don’t translate well.
Visually, lit displays are harder on our eyes than paper books in good ambient light.
e-books of course have some advantages, especially for technical material. Being able to hit “ctrl-f” and search for a single word or phrase is incredibly valuable. Constant updates of product documentation means not having to throw away books whenever a new version of the item/software is released. Linking to references (e.g. dictionary lookup) is much more convenient than going to get another book out.
But for just sitting down and reading, the tactile experience of a real book rules over everything else in my opinion. Sitting in a coffee shop with a book in hand is a profoundly human experience. Walking through the endless aisles of books at a library is both inspiring and humbling.
So in short, yeah - there is HUGE doubt that e-books are superior.
In the moment, yes.
However, the longevity of digital data is problematic. Computers have existed for less then a 100 years, but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape.
Modern protocols and formats are much more complex, so I’d say that reading your data in 100 years will be harder then reading 100 year old data today. Have a look at a pdf in a text editor. Imagine trying to figure that out once the documentation is lost. (… or stored in the pdf)
Without continual efforts to convert data or preserve hardware and software, the data will be lost.
Compare that to written documents. We have writing that’s thousands of years old, and it’s still legible and understandable. We have paper documents about as old as we’ve been able to make the stuff.
but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape
Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.
Books don’t require power or any complicated electronics to be of use.
Mostly an advantage in some apocalypse or stranded on a deserted island scenario.
Can’t prop open a door with an e-book.
Not with that attitude
Certainly not for public libraries
How so?
They cost far more (whereas physical books are heavily discounted for libraries), they have licensing terms (limited circ or time period), and there’s the issue of hosting perpetual access materials. Physical books are just cheap, durable, and most importantly yours to do whatever you want with them (donate them, sell them, make crafts with them, etc.).
Oh, right. A conventional public library can’t just pirate all of their content, I suppose.
I despise reading a book on a screen. Ebooks are inferior to physical books from a typical usage standpoint.
E-ink readers are superior to both paper and LED tablets.
Depends on the file format.
Not when you’re cold and need to start a fire
If the question is one DRM-free ebook vs. one physical book, I’d say the physical book. If the question is 100 vs. 100, or 1000 vs. 1000, ebooks all the way.
I’m really not concerned with a physical book deteriorating in my lifetime because I’m not going to leave it out to be weathered or bend the spine until it falls apart. Space is a bigger issue. Right now if I like an ebook I’ll buy the physical copy to display it at home like art.
In terms of preservation, digital media is surely superior if you use it right (i.e. using long-lasting storage media, backups and error detection).
But, some people prefer physical books just for the experience. Also physical books don’t need electricity.
Also, a DRM-free ebook may still miss some layout or images compared to a printed copy, depending on the format and how good it’s made.
All in all, I still prefer e-books.
