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What's wrong with me?

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NomoneyNohoney
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What's wrong with me?

#335927

Postby NomoneyNohoney » August 25th, 2020, 9:43 pm

I am quite a data hoarder, in that I store many films, videos, music albums and so on, and naturally enough, electronic books.
I have various readers, a couple of Kindles, a Nook, an Arnova GBook (Ugh! Even if offered one for free, turn it down, unless you can use the battery inside it...) plus reading apps on various phones and tablets. But there's a problem.

I
Don't
Enjoy
Reading
Ebooks.

There, I've said it. The Emperor has got no clothes on, and I don't enjoy screen reading. I'm Ok with physical books, but with ebooks, there's no compulsion, no, "must read it asap until I've finished."

I was the same at work, I was the Luddite who printed reports out to read and file, rather than read on screen and store. So what's wrong with me?

I promise you, I have hundreds of books unread, lots of favourite authors and new stuff that sounds really interesting, but I'm just "meh" about it.
So, what's wrong with me? Can I get better and enjoy ebooks in the future?

AleisterCrowley
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#335928

Postby AleisterCrowley » August 25th, 2020, 9:47 pm

Nowt wrong - give me a real book every time. I've got a few to read on my Fire tablet, but just for convenience on train journeys etc.
I actually collect modern first editions, and for most I have a paperback 'reading copy' so I don't damage the hardback first edition
No wonder I need so much space, and no wonder I'm unmarried :(

kiloran
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#335931

Postby kiloran » August 25th, 2020, 9:56 pm

I also much prefer real books.
If only the internet could be made available as a hard copy :)

--kiloran

GrahamPlatt
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#335932

Postby GrahamPlatt » August 25th, 2020, 9:57 pm

I used to be the same, but seem to have evolved.

Arborbridge
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#335934

Postby Arborbridge » August 25th, 2020, 10:00 pm

NomoneyNohoney wrote:I am quite a data hoarder, in that I store many films, videos, music albums and so on, and naturally enough, electronic books.
I have various readers, a couple of Kindles, a Nook, an Arnova GBook (Ugh! Even if offered one for free, turn it down, unless you can use the battery inside it...) plus reading apps on various phones and tablets. But there's a problem.

I
Don't
Enjoy
Reading
Ebooks.

There, I've said it. The Emperor has got no clothes on, and I don't enjoy screen reading. I'm Ok with physical books, but with ebooks, there's no compulsion, no, "must read it asap until I've finished."

I was the same at work, I was the Luddite who printed reports out to read and file, rather than read on screen and store. So what's wrong with me?

I promise you, I have hundreds of books unread, lots of favourite authors and new stuff that sounds really interesting, but I'm just "meh" about it.
So, what's wrong with me? Can I get better and enjoy ebooks in the future?



I have a Kindle, but I hadn't read anything using it for about a year until last week. I'd much prefer a book for various reasons which I guess are all fairly obvious to those who feel as I do!
The kindle is OK where weight is a problem, but whilst there are plenty of cheap second hand books around, there are plenty to keep me occupied without resorting to Amazon.

The only odd thing about your post, is that for someone who does not like ebooks, you have a lot of devices.

NomoneyNohoney
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#335956

Postby NomoneyNohoney » August 26th, 2020, 12:21 am

It has taken a while for me to realise that I'm not that enthusiastic an ebook reader. It's the lure of having so many books available so easily, I think.

bungeejumper
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336118

Postby bungeejumper » August 26th, 2020, 3:47 pm

Well, I've written ten or eleven books over the years, including one of the Dummies series for John Wiley, so you'll have to forgive me for expressing a bias toward physical books and magazines. They've helped to pay the bills. :D

Like everybody else, I get most of my daily news and comment online. Which means it comes at my screen like so much information-toothpaste in a tube - wide and shallow, or narrow and squeezed out very long, depending on how I've got my web browser window set up, and how large my screen magnification is. Ultimately, it's like reading text that's been written on a gigantic toilet roll that scrolls across my eyeballs until I get to the end.

The trouble is, when I'm looking at a chapter or an article, I like to know what "shape" the piece is. :) I want to know roughly how long it is, and whether the paragraphs are short or long? And whether I can read it in two minutes or ten minutes, or thirty. And whether I can skip ahead to the end if i'm bored or I'm in a hurry?

Heck, I want to know where the corners of the pages are! And how many of them there are! It doesn't seem thatmuch to ask. But an unending online bog-roll of words will never allow me that luxury. One reason why I'll always take a book or a magazine on holiday with me, not a glorified website.

I am, of course, a dinosaur. They say that many millennials hardly ever touch a book these days, and good luck to them if they can read the unending bog-roll in cyberspace without ever feeling that they're missing out on some visual part of the experience? Me, I'll keep on buying dead trees for a while longer. You always know where you are with a book. It's where you folded over the corner of the page, remember? :lol:

BJ

AleisterCrowley
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336123

Postby AleisterCrowley » August 26th, 2020, 4:03 pm

bungeejumper wrote:... But an unending online bog-roll of words ...




Blog-roll ?

Urbandreamer
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336153

Postby Urbandreamer » August 26th, 2020, 6:43 pm

I love ebooks and audiobooks.

However if you don't, then you don't.

Let me tell you what I love about them.

You can buy one, any time, anywhere and simple start to read.
They take up no space.
You can even get some of them in advance of "publication". The Publisher Baen sell e-arc's, electronic advances reader copies. They are sold before final proof reading and typesetting, so do contain the odd typo. But you can get them early.

I know many others who far prefer real books. They enjoy the smell, the feel of paper as they turn a page. Me, when I read I don't even see the page. It's a prose portal (to steal a phrase from an author). I fall to the fictive delusion. Images dance before my eyes. Sounds, smells and tastes are what is written, not what my body senses.

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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336377

Postby Charlottesquare » August 27th, 2020, 3:17 pm

For fiction my Kindle is fine, it is light, I can set the text to the size I want so as to hold it lying in bed without my arms cramping/aching, it saves a lot of space (we at one point had over 3,000 books, we still have a room with nothing but bookcases) , I can take the 800 odd books on it with me without worrying about bag weight etc and read in the evenings in the garden in poor light, but it has a flaw- it is poor with maps/schematics in history books and that to me is a serious flaw.

We have progressed to most fiction on our kindles most reference books hard copies( with the exception of Hilary Mantel and Le Carre.)

Urbandreamer
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336493

Postby Urbandreamer » August 28th, 2020, 7:49 am

Charlottesquare wrote:....t, but it has a flaw- it is poor with maps/schematics in history books and that to me is a serious flaw.

We have progressed to most fiction on our kindles most reference books hard copies( with the exception of Hilary Mantel and Le Carre.)


Have you tried a tablet? Amazon do a cheap one intended as an alternative ebook reader to the kindle.

The disadvantage is that the display is not e-ink.
The advantage is that the display is not e-ink.

So you need to charge it every day and it's not easy to read in bright light. However you do get good images suitable for maps, graphs and pictures. Limited of course by the size of the tablet.

I do confess though that for me physical books do still have an advantage as reference books. Then again I haven't learned how to use the bookmark system to rapidly move between sections as you might flip a reference book back several pages to check something then return to where you were.

UncleEbenezer
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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336741

Postby UncleEbenezer » August 29th, 2020, 11:09 am

Urbandreamer wrote:The disadvantage is that the display is not e-ink.
The advantage is that the display is not e-ink.


Regular 'puter for information and reference - with the aid of google, wikipedia, et al.

But always e-ink for fiction, and extended reading in general. Well, unless you have something in printed form, which is nice if you can afford the luxury of space for them but otherwise impractical. Those neither-fish-nor-fowl devices like the Kindle Fire or phone/tablet apps are an abomination!

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Re: What's wrong with me?

#336788

Postby PrincessB » August 29th, 2020, 3:27 pm

I disagree on this.

On numerous occasions, I've bought a physical book online and when it arrived I never read it. This has usually been due to a combination of awful yellowed cheap paper alongside a tiny point size.*

I've also got any number of devices that will read e-books and there's only one that makes it a pleasure rather than a chore.

My iPad is too heavy
My 10" Kindle is also very heavy
It just feels wrong on my phone

My weapon of choice for e-book reading is a secondhand Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" which is brilliant.**

When they Amazon bought this out, they were going head to head with Apple in an effort to have something better than the iPad and they managed it. It is light, it has a fantastic screen and the battery lasts ages. It also has the advantage of being a bit wimpy performance wise which means I don't get distracted and end up playing a game instead.

I often consider buying one of the Amazon paperwhite units with the backlighting for reading in bed - As the HDX is also fine to use in the dark, I've never gotten around to it.

I'll admit to not reading as much as I used to, I do listen to a lot of podcasts, so I feel that makes up for it.

B.

* American books tend to publish first in hardback and when they release the paperback, they shrink the page to fit the smaller size. This results in massive margins and text size that would not have looked out of place in The Times in the early 1900s.

** A second hand HDX will cost under £40, the nearest equivalent that I can think of that is being made now would be the iPad mini which is very expensive.


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