Quote:
Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor
How is an ebook by an author somehow "lower quality" than the paperback or hardcover version of the same book?
Exactly the same words, in a more convenient package. Seems like the same quality to me.
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Depends on what features of the book matter to you.
Ebook version is often illegal to loan around to friends. Even if loaning is allowed, hard to casually flip to a page or two to show to a friend at dinner. Hard to annotate; even those programs that allow annotation, don't allow you to switch between underlining, post-its, and three different colors of highlighter for different types of notes. Pictures are lower-quality than is possible in print. Can't have a nice shelf of them to show off--either for status purposes, or to offer to friends. (Baen books are loanable, but there's no simple, convenient way to set up a digital viewing library. Opening Windows Explorer with view set to thumbnails is just not as good as an actual shelf to browse.) Can't easily organize & re-organize books by categories: favorites, nostalgic, not-yet-read, "I read these two the same week so their themes always get tangled in my head and I want them next to each other on the shelf."
Ebooks are terrific for portability and searchability. The font size options are great for those who need them. (Which includes me, from time to time.) But there's plenty of traits of pbooks that are lost in an ebook, which ebook publishers & sellers all try to gloss over.
For casual, read-once purposes, ebooks are superior. For long-term & repeated use, they've got some problems.