Skip to main content

Physical books vs e-books

I recently conducted informal surveys about e-books on two readers' forums, and realised that while there is a generation of readers out there who grew up with computers and feel perfectly at ease around them, even they still prefer to read a physical book rather than an e-book. Various reasons were cited: you can take a book anywhere, books are cheap, it hurts the eyes and causes headaches to read off a computer screen, etc. etc. When I looked at the responses in-depth and asked a couple of more pointed questions, what became apparent was that the real reason for preferring physical books to e-books was that books are personal and computers are not. These readers preferred books because they loved all the different textures, smells, paper, typefaces and bindings and the sensation of turning the pages. You can never get as close to a laptop, PDA or e-book reader as you can to a book because the computers render each book identically and require you to push buttons to turn a page, and they don't give off the heady scent of ink, paper and glue (and sometimes age) that physical books do.

While I do read e-books (I even sometimes take my laptop to bed with me to read) I tend to agree with these opinions. There is something infinitely more exciting about opening a new book than opening a new computer document. For starters, computers have no discernible odour, except when they overheat, and a smell of newness which quickly disappears. I love the scent of books, and while (as I said) I do read e-books, I only do it if it's impossible for me to get the book in physical form.

Which do you prefer?

Comments

Lee said…
I have to admit that though I read online, I tend to print out what I really want to read more 'sensuously'. But I'm keeping an open mind, waiting to see what developments in new generations of ereaders will bring. It's really too early to assess their influence, likewise the changes in publishing and reading that the internet is effecting. Probably, however, it will be less of an either/or choice, but different 'devices' for different purposes, different situations.
Bibliophile said…
Thank you, Archana. If it made you want to read more, then its purpose is achieved.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme