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Nothing is as good as a real book, however I have 2 Kindles for travel etc. I realised it was a good idea to get one when I was planning my holiday kit around fitting the books in... Also great for trains, commuting and stuff.
The bad side, is you cant lend out like you would a book, of scan the bookshelves, or feel the paper in hand, or know by touch where you are in the book etc.
In short; a useful tool, not as good as a book.
AWu-Tang-
In short; a useful tool, not as good as a book.
There are trade-offs, but you're arbitrarily citing the properties of a physical book as advantages in themselves. Some of those are purely sentimental/nostalgic associations. There were probably people who regretted the new-fangled book technology that meant you no longer needed a knife to read the next page.
For example, @Johnnyw75 recommends J L Burke but
the last one was the 24th in the series I believe
If I were going to investigate Burke (which I probably won't, because there's only so much time in the world) , I'd definitely do it via Kindle rather than physical books. If I do binge read a genre author, it saves a lot of shelf space.
Another physical advantage is with big books (number of pages, not page size). I've been reading some large non-fiction books and it's much more convenient to read those as ebooks than to lug the physical original around.
No matter how often I reread an ebook, the pages aren't going to tear or be stuck together by an accidental coffee spill.
I mostly use the Kindle app rather than my old 1st-gen Kindle Paperwhite, because I use Android tablets extensively for a range of purposes (and I also find the display options more flexible, despite the Android tablets being heavier and more power hungry). Either way (Kindle or Kindle app), the ease of control over font size and lighting, regardless of your surroundings, is a boon, particularly with my long-sightedness slowly getting worse.
The biggest annoyances I've had with Kindle/ebooks is books where layout/typesetting is important. Non-fiction book with a lot of diagrams or photographs? Those are rarely placed as well as they are in the physical book, often just lumped together at the end. Large page format, with room for both diagrams/sidebars and main text? You're fucked. Footnotes important? Sorry, they're almost certainly fucked up (don't bother reading Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" books in ebook form, for example). Publishing the ebook version should get as much attention as the physical format and be treated differently, but that expense is too often skipped - which is really annoying because, when it's done right, navigating an ebook can be easier and friendlier. Sometimes, for older books, the typos and formatting options are so bizarre it seems somebody used a scanner and really shitty OCR software on a physical copy.
For all those reaons, ebooks are the worst format to read technical books.
Other minor annoyances are around Amazon not having made much effort with global and per-book settings. It seems I have to go turn off "popular highlights by tedious fuckwits who feel that underlining sentences in a book makes them intellectual/deep and they really want to share that" every single damn time.
When I was a schoolboy and then student, I used to read a new book every week. Then I moved into a profession which requires a lot of technical reading and heavily relies on people upskilling outside of working hours, so that slowed to a trickle. Ebooks turned that around for me and I read more now than I ever did. So it may not be great for bookshops, but it might not be so bad for authors.
itsbruce
What are peoples thoughts on Kindles.
My book collection is getting out of hand and whilst I love a good physical book, I also need to think about the practicalities of book ownership.