zlacker

>>bertma+(OP)
The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes..

Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...

If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..

>>southe+H01
I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.

>>Increa+H31
I understand what you mean about spatial understanding, and personally do love the the comforting reference value of having actual books on your shelves and being able to go back to specific parts of them no matter what.

However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page number and book title) and other options.

I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly replicate the possession security that physical books give. I also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example, "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.