The problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them.
On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.
I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I highlight often when reading on my kindle. I have created a small program that scrapes my highlights and sends me a daily email with one of them. I get it before I wake up and it’s the first thing I read once I check my email (usually that happens after my morning reading).
I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book.
That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.
I wrote a python script that I run locally which scrapes read.amazon.com (think this is the URL, I’ll double check when I’m home). Kindle highlights are automatically synced there. The Python scraper extracts all highlights into a json file and stores this in S3.
I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails.
I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop.
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.
I'm not an ebook reader, but I would have assumed that these apps would have some sort of indication if you've read a book or not and if you've not read to the end some sort of progress. Like opening an ebook that you did not complete should hopefully take you to where you left off at a minimum. I'd also expect your app to have a management type of display where I'd expect some sort of sorting/filtering where you can see only the books completely read, the books started but not finished, and books not yet started. I'd even somewhat expect a skeuomorphic layout of books on a shelf that you could somehow rearrange like it was iPhone 1.0. Again, I'm not an ebook person and never used any of the apps, so maybe these are standard things. However, it should make things easier to know if you've read them or not.
If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.
If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.
They do, but a physical book has a presence that digital books lack. Like weight, cover material, print quality. I can learn from digital books fine and read novels on an ereader. But a physical book anchor your memory like no other.
I have mixed feelings about Kindle, but I mostly read books on my phone these days, and my Kindle library is always there. I also have a physical bookshelf, but if I'm not home I can't review it so in some ways it's often less tangible than my Kindle library which I always carry with me.
No but I have thought about making some sort of card or pseudo-book. Still not quite the same though, as the object wouldn’t be the one you actually read, just a reminder.
TBH I'd rather have both and in sync, namely physical in place, nearby, and digital always with me. Unfortunately I can't afford that so I have a messy compromise.
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
This agrees with studies that show that memory retention is better among students when using physical books rather than ebooks. That's because we're embodied. The book is a physical object with physical features. These intelligible physical features create associations (spatial anchoring, sensory engagement) that reinforce memory. You also get a sense of progress as you read. For instance, when I read something, I better remember at what depth certain content is, and given the depth, I know more or less what is in that part of the book. You could think of it in terms of spatial indexing or in terms of data locality.
People think the medium doesn't matter. They think that it's just a matter of encoding. But the medium very much matters, because the senses are involved in memory formation in all sorts of ways. It's also why handwriting leads to better retention of information than typing.
The signs sure seem to be indicating a Gen Z rollback to the analog and middle tech. Newspapers, books, cursive clubs, letter writing (pen pals), cassettes and albums, printed photographs, even carb/gas based auto hacking. These are just in my circle, but I have seen stories in the paper too. Anyone else seeing interesting trends from the youngers? I especially like to see the blending of new and old - like building a music server for VLPFM neighborhood station, hyper local phone co, text clubs on paper, etc.
The interesting thing to me is how media choices like these are becoming elements of identity, kind of like how if you were into 'zines there was a shared mindset and some assumptions about your beliefs and cultural approach baked into that. When everything becomes monoculture, the bar to stand apart can be almost any vector.
As you mentioned, it’s trends. There’s nothing really sticky or mass-adoption like. This also isn’t necessarily new, as polaroids have been trending for over a decade now.
Most of the same kids still scroll instagram, listen on spotify and etc. At least that’s what I’m seeing around me.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. As someone who regularly buys old stuff, the price goes up and down with trends that bare little resemblance to any “return to form”. It’s mostly people looking to turn a quick buck before they go onto some other trinket. We sit and wait it out, or wait for sellers who are not clued in on a given hype cycle.
I've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.
Im just contemplating that the cultural filter function that was the recognition of a work by the pulic is deactivated. Even a book that just drowns without any splash may reincarnate as an "idea" from the training material. Yes, the author is forgotten, but the idea lives on.
I didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.
> Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands.
Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.
There's plenty of books that have revisions, but yes, the first version does not physically change. Then again, other than collectors, I don't know many people that have multiple books of each revision/reprint of the same book. To your point, it's not like you can read a book, go to bed, and then wake up to a modified book. However, you could damage your book and go to have it replaced with a different version. Say you loan/give your copy away knowing you can get a new one easier than having your recipient get a copy for themselves. Your new one could be different. It's happened to me
Digital files that you store on your own storage media with free software also can't change (without your intervention). But in new generations many only have phones, not even laptops.
Absolutely, and the future where everything digital is "in the cloud" seems closer and closer every day. RAM and SSD costs skyrocketing sure is squeezing out the consumer and making her more dependent on cloud-based services.
Personally, I don’t see any advantage of a real book over an ebook (locally stored) in an e-ink reader. And there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment.
EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.
There are some fields where there are a real measurable advantages of physical books, essentially as an archive.
I can name two:
1) Chemical Engineering
2) Classics
In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.
In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.
In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).
In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.
Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:
He of the stout quarrel chest said:
It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.
Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.
For me the advantage is simplicity. I pick up the book and I read it. No matter where or when, I know I can read it. If the book gets damaged, I pick up another book, I don't mind.
The problem with digital books is that I need 3 different things working together: 1) a (charged) reading device, 2) corresponding software, 3) the actual digital book.
So the reading device can be put in unmaintained mode any time by the company who sells it. That sucks. Same goes for the corresponding software, although in this case I have more flexibility sometimes (i.e., I can install some open source software... but that's a hassle in itself). As per the actual digital book, don't get me started with DRM. One can pirate books, though, but then some people have ethical considerations.
I typically buy second-hand books. It's the best deal for me because I don't have the feeling to be super protective with them, and they are very cheap.
I hope you're saying that is only applicable to you personally and not applying that to every other human on the planet. There are plenty of real world advantages a physical book has over an ebook, even if you can't think of them. On of my favorites was not having to turn my book off during airplane take off and landing. Also, books do not run out of battery so they do not need to be recharged. You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session. But I'm not going to sit here typing out every single difference I can think of just because you can't think of any
Keep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with.
That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.
An embarrassingly large number of epubs have absolute no care put into formatting, in my experience. That and how do I get my "old book paper smell" fix and those beautifully illustrated hardback covers neatly lined on my shelves?
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot less to do with "seeking tangible connections to the past", and much more with the fact that there are a few book collecting Youtubers who's short form content is getting popular and shows how much people can theoretically earn with old books.
I feel like most of these types of beliefs are in the realm of people's desires to differentiate themselves rather than anything intrinsic about how they do it.
There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups.
If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction.
The problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them.
On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin.
I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I highlight often when reading on my kindle. I have created a small program that scrapes my highlights and sends me a daily email with one of them. I get it before I wake up and it’s the first thing I read once I check my email (usually that happens after my morning reading).
I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book.
That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.
Could you share more details on how you were able to set this up? Do you use Koreader?
I wrote a python script that I run locally which scrapes read.amazon.com (think this is the URL, I’ll double check when I’m home). Kindle highlights are automatically synced there. The Python scraper extracts all highlights into a json file and stores this in S3.
I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails.
I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop.
It’s a bit hacked together but it works lol.
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.
I'm not an ebook reader, but I would have assumed that these apps would have some sort of indication if you've read a book or not and if you've not read to the end some sort of progress. Like opening an ebook that you did not complete should hopefully take you to where you left off at a minimum. I'd also expect your app to have a management type of display where I'd expect some sort of sorting/filtering where you can see only the books completely read, the books started but not finished, and books not yet started. I'd even somewhat expect a skeuomorphic layout of books on a shelf that you could somehow rearrange like it was iPhone 1.0. Again, I'm not an ebook person and never used any of the apps, so maybe these are standard things. However, it should make things easier to know if you've read them or not.
If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.
If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.
They do, but a physical book has a presence that digital books lack. Like weight, cover material, print quality. I can learn from digital books fine and read novels on an ereader. But a physical book anchor your memory like no other.
I have mixed feelings about Kindle, but I mostly read books on my phone these days, and my Kindle library is always there. I also have a physical bookshelf, but if I'm not home I can't review it so in some ways it's often less tangible than my Kindle library which I always carry with me.
Have you considered printing a book side and putting it on a wall as a growing poster while keeping a Calibre or Zotero collection in sync?
No but I have thought about making some sort of card or pseudo-book. Still not quite the same though, as the object wouldn’t be the one you actually read, just a reminder.
TBH I'd rather have both and in sync, namely physical in place, nearby, and digital always with me. Unfortunately I can't afford that so I have a messy compromise.
Make each pseudo-book a cheap cover around your ereader and just stick it in while reading :)
> I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
This agrees with studies that show that memory retention is better among students when using physical books rather than ebooks. That's because we're embodied. The book is a physical object with physical features. These intelligible physical features create associations (spatial anchoring, sensory engagement) that reinforce memory. You also get a sense of progress as you read. For instance, when I read something, I better remember at what depth certain content is, and given the depth, I know more or less what is in that part of the book. You could think of it in terms of spatial indexing or in terms of data locality.
People think the medium doesn't matter. They think that it's just a matter of encoding. But the medium very much matters, because the senses are involved in memory formation in all sorts of ways. It's also why handwriting leads to better retention of information than typing.
I share this feeling. When I want to free up some space, the books I get rid of are the ones I don't remember reading.
Aren't they the ones you'd want to read?
The signs sure seem to be indicating a Gen Z rollback to the analog and middle tech. Newspapers, books, cursive clubs, letter writing (pen pals), cassettes and albums, printed photographs, even carb/gas based auto hacking. These are just in my circle, but I have seen stories in the paper too. Anyone else seeing interesting trends from the youngers? I especially like to see the blending of new and old - like building a music server for VLPFM neighborhood station, hyper local phone co, text clubs on paper, etc.
The interesting thing to me is how media choices like these are becoming elements of identity, kind of like how if you were into 'zines there was a shared mindset and some assumptions about your beliefs and cultural approach baked into that. When everything becomes monoculture, the bar to stand apart can be almost any vector.
As you mentioned, it’s trends. There’s nothing really sticky or mass-adoption like. This also isn’t necessarily new, as polaroids have been trending for over a decade now.
Most of the same kids still scroll instagram, listen on spotify and etc. At least that’s what I’m seeing around me.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. As someone who regularly buys old stuff, the price goes up and down with trends that bare little resemblance to any “return to form”. It’s mostly people looking to turn a quick buck before they go onto some other trinket. We sit and wait it out, or wait for sellers who are not clued in on a given hype cycle.
I've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.
Im just contemplating that the cultural filter function that was the recognition of a work by the pulic is deactivated. Even a book that just drowns without any splash may reincarnate as an "idea" from the training material. Yes, the author is forgotten, but the idea lives on.
I didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.
> Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands.
Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.
There's plenty of books that have revisions, but yes, the first version does not physically change. Then again, other than collectors, I don't know many people that have multiple books of each revision/reprint of the same book. To your point, it's not like you can read a book, go to bed, and then wake up to a modified book. However, you could damage your book and go to have it replaced with a different version. Say you loan/give your copy away knowing you can get a new one easier than having your recipient get a copy for themselves. Your new one could be different. It's happened to me
Digital files that you store on your own storage media with free software also can't change (without your intervention). But in new generations many only have phones, not even laptops.
Absolutely, and the future where everything digital is "in the cloud" seems closer and closer every day. RAM and SSD costs skyrocketing sure is squeezing out the consumer and making her more dependent on cloud-based services.
I am just hoping that the cost will eventually go down in a few years, and we will be able to start homelabbing again.
My server drives are not going to last forever...
Personally, I don’t see any advantage of a real book over an ebook (locally stored) in an e-ink reader. And there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment.
EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.
There are some fields where there are a real measurable advantages of physical books, essentially as an archive.
I can name two:
1) Chemical Engineering 2) Classics
In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.
In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.
In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).
In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.
Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:
He of the stout quarrel chest said:
It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.
Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.
For me the advantage is simplicity. I pick up the book and I read it. No matter where or when, I know I can read it. If the book gets damaged, I pick up another book, I don't mind. The problem with digital books is that I need 3 different things working together: 1) a (charged) reading device, 2) corresponding software, 3) the actual digital book.
So the reading device can be put in unmaintained mode any time by the company who sells it. That sucks. Same goes for the corresponding software, although in this case I have more flexibility sometimes (i.e., I can install some open source software... but that's a hassle in itself). As per the actual digital book, don't get me started with DRM. One can pirate books, though, but then some people have ethical considerations.
I typically buy second-hand books. It's the best deal for me because I don't have the feeling to be super protective with them, and they are very cheap.
I hope you're saying that is only applicable to you personally and not applying that to every other human on the planet. There are plenty of real world advantages a physical book has over an ebook, even if you can't think of them. On of my favorites was not having to turn my book off during airplane take off and landing. Also, books do not run out of battery so they do not need to be recharged. You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session. But I'm not going to sit here typing out every single difference I can think of just because you can't think of any
Keep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with.
That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.
In terms of content, there’s not much pros. But we are physical creatures and the physicality of a book can be an (pleasurable?) experience in itself.
An embarrassingly large number of epubs have absolute no care put into formatting, in my experience. That and how do I get my "old book paper smell" fix and those beautifully illustrated hardback covers neatly lined on my shelves?
Otherwise, I agree.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot less to do with "seeking tangible connections to the past", and much more with the fact that there are a few book collecting Youtubers who's short form content is getting popular and shows how much people can theoretically earn with old books.
I feel like most of these types of beliefs are in the realm of people's desires to differentiate themselves rather than anything intrinsic about how they do it.
There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups.
If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction.
but you be you.
also r/datahoarder