How many of you read an actual paper book?
- Thread starter wheems
- Start date
dstuttgen
iPF Novice
My wife and I have hundreds of books on our bookshelves and I have this thing, I like to have a hardcover of the books I especially enjoy (mostly classic literature) but as I said in an earlier post, when I received my Kindle 1, I never looked back. Now I do all my reading on my iPad 2 in either iBook or Kindle for iPad. I do read in Stanza, too (on my iPad).
My library/office (which sadly needs a good straightening)
My library/office (which sadly needs a good straightening)
OP
OP
wheems
iPF Noob
dstuttgen said:My wife and I have hundreds of books on our bookshelves and I have this thing, I like to have a hardcover of the books I especially enjoy (mostly classic literature) but as I said in an earlier post, when I received my Kindle 1, I never looked back. Now I do all my reading on my iPad 2 in either iBook or Kindle for iPad. I do read in Stanza, too (on my iPad).
My library/office (which sadly needs a good straightening)
<img src="http://www.ipadforums.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=4462"/>
I have the same *thing*, too -- if it's a book I've absolutely loved I have to *own* a physical copy of it. The classics are all in hardback (Penguin came out w these beautiful hardbacks not too long ago), but I've paperback copies of each to actually read...
JewelGarden
iPF Novice
Love to read in any format! Can't get all my favorites in e- formats yet so have many greatly loved paper books. Since my home is tiny I get e-books whenever possible to save space and have them handy.
Yes we all know that people now read ebooks and ibooks but they still read paper books. today paper books don't have that influence as before but they are still very popular among so many people's
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Books are irreplaceable. Forget e-ink, e-paper, and LCD screens. There is something wonderful about a printed manuscript. A fellow collector owns a galley proof that is known to have been read and handled by its author. To book collectors, this is a big deal.
And if you learn bookbinding, there is plenty of opportunity to create something far more important than an e-book. E-books can die; a volume hand-bound in leather with custom marbled end-papers and edge gilding is something that can last for centuries.
Nothing can replace print on paper in my view.
To be fair, I am too old to be lugging around 100 books, so the iPad does have a place in my saddlebags. But so does my latest book (arrived last week) which is a used volume ("Happy England") I plan to keep forever.
Sadly, many people prefer e-books. That's OK, but only for convenience. The printed word is much different. I still must print manuscripts for editing. I just can't edit on screen. Granted, today it is much easier than in the good old days when one moved paragraphs around physically and scotch tape was our friend.
My first 'book' was published by me on a Mimeograph in the basement of The Ross Jurney Advertising Agency, sometime in 1967/68. I remember the effort and the terrible premise, and it was not a best seller.
I seem to recall the Mimeograph Fluid fumes were good for a lark.
As an aside, the e-book revolution bothers me because everyone thinks they can write and sadly, many do. Lulu and other such services allows triviality, crap, boring writing, gremmer and skpelleding ereerors to manifestoed themselves in printed form.
I still frequent garage sales looking for something that the seller thinks is crap and returns to me a nice price for my 26 cent investment.
I was quick to adopt the crazy new (at the time) invention from AT&T. It was a large and heavy typewriter with very little memory and a half-inch high (?) LCD screen about two or perhaps three inches wide. You could cut and paste, skpeel checke, and do other things that at the time were cool. Like a simple form of mail merge and a way to correct words. It had a cartridge of adhesive tape that lifted the ink from the page, letter by letter.
Then came the PC and a shareware WP program. It was great because you could move paragraphs around and spell check, no grammar check, however. It ran on an 8088 IBM machine and under DOS in memory without the need for a HDD.
Then I bought the DOS version of Word, and it worked well enough but hard to use when diagrams and images were to be accurately placed. Then Windows 3.1/For Workgroups arrived and when Word For Windows was released, it made me more productive.
The Internet makes it effortless to discover new things and research things like Patents. Before the Web, a patent search required a trip to the library and viewing roll after roll of microfilm. Now I do it from my iPad in the bathroom if I like.
That said, I have access to large libraries and finding source documents often show just how skewed and biased the net can be when the same info is parsed and posted. There is some value in referring to the printed word and the source documents.
I can still use a typewriter. If my PC dies, I could bang out something on the Royal. But improvements and wide-spread adoption of technology like the PC makes finding things like ribbons difficult because they are not made these days in volume. And I must still find some liquid paper for the errors.
It is easier to find parts for a Marchant Calculator today, than it was when the machines were in wide-spread use. No need to write letters and wait for the mail to arrive. Besides, no local parts sources and SCM no longer makes parts.
You had to be a good typist back in the day. Editors did not tolerate large numbers of errors. If you missed something, when you received the galleys it was very costly to make corrections. Moving a simple line around meant lots of work for the typesetter. And it was a cost that was sometimes billed to the writer.
It was a BIG DEAL to make simple corrections, so many writers were also excellent typists and proofreaders.
I remember creating a brochure using type that was set by a local printer. Very limited font choice and it was expensive. It had to be cut and pasted (literally) in place using rubber cement. Now, cut and paste is effortless and it's done sans rubber cement.
There was a time when if you wanted to put two color chromes together, you physically stripped each color layer and reassembled it in place. Archival storage sometimes required color separating the color image and storing the three pieces of archivally processed black and white film for later recovery.
I learned to airbrush because I had no choice. Spotting colors were used to fix spots due to dust, and other such things that are effortless to do with PS. Despite the technology, I still prefer the old ways and I am tired of being told "the old way is done with and gone...there is a better way." Balderdash and I call Shenanigans.
One thing technology does not do is improve the quality. Bad writers simply churn out increasing volumes of bad writing. I recall when video cameras arrived. No more 8/Super 8/16 millimeter film needed. What I saw was not increased production values, just hour after hour of bad video.
I recall the Polaroid Instant Movie process. Because it was fast, people got lazy and produced costly instant crappy movies. YouTube shows movies made with the EVO 3D. Crappy videos that ignore almost every rule stereo photographers must adhere to. New tech but forgetting the old ways.
Technology makes us lazy but film makes us pay attention to the details because of the costs involved. Film and processing was not cheap, neither were costs of color printing.
I'll guess very few people on this list have ever walked into a darkroom. Have any of you ever processed Ektachrome, Kodacolor, or made a color print? No need because PS, a color printer, and a digital camera makes it effortless to create a color print. Then again, a modern printed digital image can't hold a candle to a Dye Transfer print, so I'll shut up. Smiley.
Ironically, if I were making color dye transfer prints today, the net would give me access to thousands of potential buyers that did not readily exist when materials were still available. Digital images helped kill the color printing business, but the Internet brought us new life because our potential customers are world-wide, not just local.
I could make a good living printing high quality black and white prints and offering them over the Internet.
Now days, we have a place to find the old technology that was replaced by new technology and there are many potential customers that twenty years ago, when the old stuff was in vogue, were hard to find. Is that irony?
Anyway . . . my opinion.
Bob is torn. I do not advocate tossing books, but some books like paperback books have zero market value and available in large quantities, new and used. They will likely always be available in large quantities, So I can see replacing some books with an electronic version.
Books are hard to deal with. They take up lots of space, they require care and it takes considerable effort to maintain a large collection of paperback books. So again, I am torn. I'll likely save them all, but to what end? In the final wash, an e-book version is "just as good" as a printed volume.
Rare/out of print/first editions/illuminated manuscripts are another thing altogether. Those must be saved.
One thing I might suggest is donating your unwanted volumes to the local library, the VA Hospital, local schools, etc.
LOL . . . Nevermind
Clarify please.
A guy named Gutenberg started it all, essentially, with movable type in the year 1400 or thereabouts. Before that, books were rare and costly because a thousand copies meant monks or workers in Narnia had to duplicate each volume in pen and ink.
Not sure why you think books are " fairly recent inventions..." Perhaps I am not following your reasoning.
singlestick
iPF Noob
Six hundred years or so is a blip in human history. And it's not as if writing or publishing in some form did not exist before Gutenberg. The very literate in ancient Greece and Rome had a heck of a scroll collection. I'm sure that someone thought that clay tablets were all you would ever need to keep up with what was happening.
The excellent James Burke tv program "Connections," available out there somewhere, maybe on YouTube, gives a great perspective on this.
My other point is that a lot of great works saw their first publication in magazines and newspapers. The published book was a later resource. This includes a range of stuff, from the works of Dickens and Conan Doyle to the initial appearance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in America.
Oh yeah, and Gutenberg adapted printing techniques used in Asia. He did not quite start it all, but moved it in a revolutionary direction.
ingrid1946
iPF Noob
I'm only buying ebooks from now on. Even magazines. And my bird & craft magazines are switching so I'm happy about that. I can keep all my craft magazines in Evernote & make notes, highlight, access links, watch videos & print occasionally & generally have a big library & it's always with me. What's not to like about that?
I don't really get the romance of the paper book thing. They're dirty & dry out your hands. Also I'm on lists that talk about books so the subjects I read about have broadened tremendously. I'm reading more often too. Not so sure if I'll continue reading on the Kindle device as I mostly read those books on the iPad now because I like the Kindle reader best (dictionary!!!). The point for me is to read. Not so much what electronic device. It's like the iPad: I'm curious to find out stuff & now I can do it any time, anywhere. Love that to bits.
Sent from my iPad using iPF
I don't really get the romance of the paper book thing. They're dirty & dry out your hands. Also I'm on lists that talk about books so the subjects I read about have broadened tremendously. I'm reading more often too. Not so sure if I'll continue reading on the Kindle device as I mostly read those books on the iPad now because I like the Kindle reader best (dictionary!!!). The point for me is to read. Not so much what electronic device. It's like the iPad: I'm curious to find out stuff & now I can do it any time, anywhere. Love that to bits.
Sent from my iPad using iPF
Some people get it and some never will. A book is far more than just words on paper; many things about printed books many will not understand. And that is fine.
Not sure what you mean by dirty and dry out your hands. Some books do I suppose. I have a dirty first edition or two.
