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Originally Posted by piper28
I will admit one thing that I've found somewhat annoying with ebooks. Some of the books I read will have maps at various points in the book, and every now and then I'd like to flip back to refer to them. For whatever reason, I've found that significantly more of a pain in an ebook than I do in a real book. I am learning, by adding bookmarks, but it's still somewhat clunky to me, and I never remember to mark the spot until I realize that I wanted to go back there.
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This is one of the *big* features that ebooks are lacking, and it's what'll keep them from getting bigger in the academic world. There are students who've figured out methods, because the weight difference is *so* extreme, but research use of ebooks is still in baby-developmental stage.
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Oh, and for all those that keep bringing up the built-in dictionary: how many people really use it?
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Apparently a lot. I don't have one in my reader, but I gather that many people really like having it. Especially if they're reading in something other than their first language. But it's definitely a "shrug" option, like an index in paper books--nice when it's there for those few times you actually care, but in most books, you'd never notice it's missing.
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I really wish the print aficionados would pay more attention to which features are actually valuable, and to whom, rather than listing off "twenty ways in which print books are different from ebooks, which I'm going to insist make them better, because damned if I'm going to make the same list from the other side."
Ebooks have easy search. Pbooks have easy flip-through-pages. Both features are useful for research--and the fact that ebooks don't have one is a matter of software development, not an inherent flaw in ebooks.
At least they've mostly stopped whining about the
smell of books.