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Originally Posted by HarryT
May I ask someone who voted in that way, how you managed before electronic bookreaders appeared?
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This is a religious issue, like copyright or DRM: one feels a certain way, one is highly unlikely to change, and thus conversations on the topic tend to be pointless and not unoften snarky. Fully realizing the pointlessness of even trying to discuss the topic with an adherent of a rival faith, I'll yet waste a moment on it.
I want an ebook that is
more than paper. Not a weak copy of it. If paper was supreme, I'd have no reason to bother with device-based reading. What I get from a device is large type (I format everything on my 1150 at the largest font size), having a score of books loaded so I can switch between the 3-6 I'm reading at any one time, occasionally making notes or doing searches, and having a unit with built-in lighting.
Why choose
not to have self-lighting? Why waste light on a whole room when the text can easily handle that? Why fiddle with a booklight? It seems positively perverse. For battery life? I don't worship battery life. I get over 20 hours on an eBookwise charge. I don't find plugging it in twice a week burdensome. I
do find reading by the light of the book at midnight cozy.
The supposed benefits of e-ink really aren't, exclusively. Battery life, dpi, sunlight readability tend to be what's cited. But those aren't inherent. The OLPC screen has a higher dpi than current e-ink and does sunlight fine. E-ink's lacks aren't inherent, either: an e-ink screen could have bezel lighting; it's just that no manufacturer has bothered to do the obvious.
We live in an imperfect world. We choose from flawed tech. I almost never read in direct sunlight, so the fact that managing it on an ETI-2 means angling the screen
just so doesn't greatly inconvenience me. Charging the unit twice a week isn't a trial. A higher dpi would be nice, but not worth losing lighting for.
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Do you never read paper books?
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Not nearly as much as I now read on my eBookwise. I had to get reading glasses last year (so now I have distance glasses, closeup glasses, and prescription sunglasses; you'd think someone would make a container to carry multiple glasses around, but no; like so many things I want, they don't make it). Paperbacks tend to have fonts that are annoyingly small. I read the newspaper and a couple of magazines, but for books I've switched almost exclusively to my ETI-2. There's lots of stuff I can read, more than I'll ever live long enough to finish, so it doesn't matter if I can't find a particular book in an e-format: it'll likely show up one day.