Quote:
Originally Posted by tirsales
I actually DISLIKE using paper-books for research. If you have a solid format for your scientific or technical e-books (e.g. hyperlinked, nice search-function, cross-linking to other volumes, etc) an e-books is so much more comfortable.
Yes, I like opening a book in the middle or flipping through it to search for a given image (or similar) - but this is just a question of programming the UI.
Give "page galeries" (e.g. showing 4-16 pages "per page"), a "flip bar" where you can click "just left of the middle", a nice index (toc, to images, to tables, index, ...) - and really, the new UI is better 
And regarding "annotation on the screen" - well, that is why touchscreens exists. As soon as you add color to your e-readers (and to your touchscreen) I can find not a single point in using p-books for myself. No, really - I cannot.
And we're not even talking about linking to internet-content or automatically updating your books - which would be very welcome in scientific publishing, where books are quite often outdated the moment they get published. At least this is true in the growing field of biotechnologies and related subjects.
But I don't think that p-books will disappear, for the very reason that a large number of people is afraid of using new techniques or so used to p-books that switching to e-books would simply be very hard.
So p-books will still exist - at least for one generation - but I guess they will get more expensive with a growing e-book market. Especially in technical and scientific publishing. |
The powers out and the ereader's battery just went dead. What do you do?
Paperbooks serve a purpose, people arent afraid of new technology, theyre skeptical of the downsides (and there are downsides.)