Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Did you sit reading your pBooks with a stack of dictionaries by your side? If not, why not? You obviously need them since you don't understand the words in the books you read. A dictionary is not essential if you understand the words.
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When I read pbooks, I will often hold a few pages between my fingers to be able to flip back & forth to a couple of important sections (like charts); when I run across a detail that doesn't seem to make sense, I flip back a few pages to confirm what's bothering me. These are very difficult to manage in ebooks.
When I read pbooks, I can highlight or make notes next to important sections. I can't do this with my ebook readers. (I could, with a different reader--but I still wouldn't be able to photocopy that page, with my markups, and show it to someone else.) I can use three different colors of post-it notes as bookmarks, to tag the difference between "quote this section" and "cross-confirm this fact" and "key point related to thesis." EBooks don't let me do that easily; some platforms don't let me do it at all.
The issue isn't, "can ebooks re-create the pbook experience EXACTLY?" It can't, and it shouldn't bother trying. Ebooks do something things better and some things worse. I'm strongly in the "mostly better" camp, but I know we're losing some aspects of what's useful & effective in pbooks.
The issue is, "what can be done simply & effectively digitally, and why aren't some ebook formats/platforms doing it?"
Dictionary lookup should be an *easy* thing to include. So should drop caps. (It is *ridiculous* that MS Word still doesn't offer drop caps.) So should attached-and-exportable annotations, if not on-screen annotations.
The grumbling isn't about comparing ebooks to pbooks; we're all agreed (AFAIK) that ebooks aren't trying to be "pbooks on a screen" any more than email is a letter on a screen. Different media; different possibilities; different standards--it's not a "flaw" of email that you can't dip it in perfume before sending it. The concern is about what ebooks can do compared to each other.