What are your thoughts on e-readers?

I have a kindle keyboard 3 from like 2010, is it worth upgrading to something newer? It works fine, but I've been thinking about upgrading to the voyage, just because of the sharper screen and the backlight.

I'm always trying to read more instead of wasting time on vidya and channing, but I've been using a kindle fire that I got as a gift a while back. Basically, it's a hypershit tablet with an LED display that has the kindle name slapped on it, barely qualifies as an ereader.

I've been thinking about upgrading to an actual ereader, but I'm literally fucking Raskolnikov and can't afford to drop $50 bucks or so on a used Kindle if I'm not absolutely sure it'll make reading a better experience. Should I go for it, or should I get a booklight (I love reading in the dark) and convert to paper like a non-casual? I love that I can just download any pdf/mobi/whatever, but I’d give that up if I’m truly missing out here.

They're amazing. Especially for studying difficult texts with unusual vocabularies. All the more so for studying foreign languages.

They deserve to be loved and treasured.

I have 5th gen paperwhite and it's truly outstanding. Can recommend dropping $40 on it. Free books, ez footnotes, beautiful display, wiki & dictionary, etc.

Honestly I respect where you're coming from, but I find e-readers sooo much comfier than physical books.

>Self illuminated (if you want) so no fiddling with lighting

>No making sure your finger is wet enough to turn a page, page turn is effortless and reliable, you barely need to move to flip your page so you can stay in your comfy position.

>No matter the size of the book, you can hold it with ease. Dune and the Bible are as light and as maneuverable as anything else.

>You never have an aging book issue. Unless you're loaded you'll be borrowing from library's, very respectable, but the quality of those books vary a lot. You can borrow with Overdrive and it'll be the same pristine condition every single time.

I get the appeal of paper, and I don't disrespect your preference, but it's somewhat objectively more comfortable to use an e-reader.

I bought one of the first kindles back in college, and it single-handedly rekindled (heh) my love for reading again, and got me writing a lot more.

So yeah, whatever helps you consume more literature, go for it. I don't think any form is more "valid" than any other. Hell, listen to audiobooks if you want.
It's the words that count.

My kindle on my commute has been amazing.

i still have one of these.
15 years, and still happy with it. For what it's worth i has me convinced eink is worth the money. It feels great, with buttons and a full metal construction, with two large bezels , actually designed for either portrait or landscape use , and with a battery life in the weeks not days. I love it!
I've considered new readers before but they were never enough of an upgrade. They can do PDF's (so can mine, but only technically) and have a backlight but thats just not worth 130$. Particularly when the screen is not noticeably better in anything except refresh speed.

I decided notes, and other reader app's would make it worth it, but those are just so fucking expensive! Those Onyx, Remarkable and Supernote ones are all in the 400$ plus range. Frankly i'd rather get a used Surface Duo for the same price. E ink is nice, but not 400$ nice. .

There is something called the MobiScribe Origin which is 200ish, and is maybe worth it, but i have yet to convince myself of that. In fact, if anyone's got the experience or done some the research, i'd like to hear from ya.

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Mine fills up a bar at the bottom of the screen, not very hard to replicate...

Mine has an ETA as well as a percentage readout. So...

you didn't really read the book if you read it on an e-reader

I have a nook glowlight 1 but I'm thinking of upgrading to nook glowlight 4 since it's a different decade and whatnot

I read both physical books and on an ereader. Although I like physical books, I just don't have much space whereas with the ereader, space isn't an issue. There's many books that are long out of print as physical books and hard to find or expensive, but you can easily get ebooks for them. I like the font size options too. After reading on the ereader for a while then going back to a mass market paperback, the text always seems tiny. I've ended up with my main focus for physical books being books by favourite authors, or books that you can't get as ebooks.

Ereaders don't last forever though: I recently bought a Kobo Libra 2 after my Kobo Glo HD's battery started wearing out after 5 years of regular use. So you need to factor in having to buy a new one every few years. It's important to strip the DRM from any purchased books too. That way, if Kobo goes out of business and my next ereader is a Kindle, I can use Calibre to convert all my ebooks to a format that Kindle accepts.

>Kobo Glo HD's battery started wearing out after 5 years
*laughs in chinese*

Yep, definitely lower end of the expected lifetime. I did give it a trashing during those 5 years though. I went through 2 different covers because the first one was worn out after a couple of years.

Just got this delivered today actually. In the same boat pretty much: Wanted a good e-reader, and the ones that allowed note taking seemed cool, but I'm not shelling out $400 for any of them.

can you make a followup thread later on ?
I'm still unsure

>Do you like them?
I read a book every week or two so it's an easy way to spend less money also takes up less space and has nice features
>Do you think they're a valid way to consume literature or are hard copies inherently better?
yes same as with a book you're just looking at ink
>Do you have a favorite?
not really only ever bought one (h2o libra)

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Ebooks are pretty handy in my opinion. I read them whenever I'm away from home as I'd rather not bring a physical copy and risk damaging it. I used to only read ebooks for a few years until recently when I started collecting and reading more books physically. Ebooks are great but nothing tops the feel of a physical book in your hands.

>continues to read on a digitally written, digitally processed, digitally produced book that pages were processed in big electro-chemical factories in his eletrically heated apartement with a electric light-bulb.

huh, so this is the power of ideology

on a side note e-papers dont even use electricity do display, only to change the formation of the particles, thats why the battery lasts so long

mine has speakers and every 5 minutes loudly announces how many pages there are left in the 3 most recently opened books (i couldnt afford to deactivate this option on my kindle)

youtube.com/watch?v=fDBzQkWeQ5g

not same poster but i agree. ability to highlight a sentence or word and instantly look it up on an e reader is incredible. also ability to store thousands of books on a single device is invaluable to traveling. there is something to be said about a physical book or shelf of them though. it's comfy.

holy shit, I'm laughing

I've been using an e-reader for about nine months.
What I love most about them is the ability to use a font of my choosing (not just the built-in ones, but a side-loaded font), and the option to change font size.
My vision is impaired so that really helps me a lot.

I am fully convinced that e-reader technology is currently not developed enough for e-books to supersede physical books. There are multiple reasons but the main ones are
>In order to have a comfortable reading experience comparable with that of a physical book, you need a screen that is at least 9.7 inches or larger; there are currently only a few e-readers on the market with screens this large and almost all of them are $300 or more (and the ones that are under $300 have significant drawbacks, like low resolutions/PPI, no backlight, etc)
>Competing / inconsistent ebook formats: the two most common brands (Kobo and Kindle) each have their own preferred format (Kepub and AZW, respectively), but the most common, accepted format is Epub. Also, there are no standards for how ebooks should be formatted: even from professional publishers who are making ebook versions of their books (Penguin, Library of America, Modern Library, etc), the formatting is all over the place and there is no consistency in how the ebook is split into sections/chapters, the use of the .epub tag types, the use of embedded fonts, pre-set line spacing and typeface size, etc.
There are only two solutions to this that have popped up so far: the first one is Standard Ebooks; they have a very strict manual of style and formatting guide to make sure that all of their ebooks are consistent and well-formatted without any of the weird issues you get from ebooks produced by official publishers; the only drawback is that they currently only produce ebooks of works that are in the public domain. The second solution is to use exclusively PDFs of scanned books:, since they retain the professional typesetting and formatting of the physical book; the drawback is that you need a very large screen to properly read them, and you lose several features (reflowable text, interchangable typefaces, searchable/high-lightable text, etc). Also, getting good scans of PDFs and turning them into something that can be easily read on an e-reader is difficult, and PDFs have much larger filesizes than other ebook formats, especially when you add OCR; digital storage space is getting cheaper, however, so this last point is not as important.
>This is a more minor point but: digital typesetting on e-readers is currently nowhere near developed enough to rival traditional print typesetting; the quality of digital fonts is wildly inconsistent and the typesetting engines used to render text in epubs and other ebook formats is severely underdeveloped (lack of proper kerning, for example).

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I enjoy them because I can fit a ton of books on them. I also like the fact that no one can see which book i'm reading.

I'll contribute if another thread is made later on, but it seems solid for the little time I've used it. It's the first one I've ever owned, so I can't really compare it to anything, but I'd say it's a good budget option, assuming it isn't being sold for $80-$90 and beyond (I managed to find mine complete for $45 on ebay).
Ultimately it comes down to what you want out of one. If you really want word-searching/defining or any note-taking function, then just save up, cause this one just meets the primary appeal of e-readers (saving space and money).

>buy cheap kindle
>turn on airplane mode
>get "free" books
Never looked back.

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I do the same but never turned on the airplane mode, is Bezos gonna break my legs?

i prefer books if I'm at home but if I'm going on a month or two long trip an ereader is needed. The problem that I have with ereaders is they're such a fucking pain in the ass to get configured correctly: every book torrent has some dumbass torrent that needs to be configured and only fits like 1/4th of the ereader or it just requires an hour of trouble shooting post conversion to the "appropriate" file type. It's way easier to just buy paper books. There's no way I'm spending $10 or more on a fucking pdf file, so I will never buy anything electronic document wise

exactly, this is why i refuse the use ereaders. The differing file formats is fucking retarded and impossible to navigate easily

Maybe you should read a book about math to learn how to do this manually in five seconds.

I'm not Rain Man and I can't visualize percentages when I see a page count. Simple as.

I've been reading on 26reads.com on my phone when I'm pooping and showering
I've read a novel and half a dozen short stories over the last month like so

ereaders are amazing.

One thing I find that I like about e-readers is that they are a very convenient way of reading larger books. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on my Kindle and I've gotta say it was a more pleasant experience than lugging around an 850 page novel. I think I'd prefer physical for average sized books though, that's just all around cozier.

Haven't there been studies that people tend to remember the content of books significantly better than digital texts? Having a spatial element, like knowing you are physically in the middle of the book, helps engage structural thinking and helps imprint the text's and its details.

I have a love/hate relationship with physical books. Expensive and hard to bring around. I am a uni student so carrying 2/3 current reads for class around is a mess. On the other hand, physical books give me a feeling of superiority.

I use a Kobo Libra 2 simply because I can pirate everything I have ever wanted, and its wonderful for reading outside, in class, in bed, anywhere. Its so easy to pickup and read a couple of pages.

For books that I use as refernece works (spinoza's ethics, three critques, any of schopenhauer), i prefer physical copies if im gonna be flicking back and forth between annotations. Overall, I have a ginormous electronic collection due in part to the wonderful zlibrary, and its hella efficient.

yes. retention is better reading from physical paper than it is from screens

Interesting. Now that I think of it, I've never tried to read nonfiction on an e-reader.

Why do you need to turn on airplane mode? I pirate all my books and swap between my phone and kindle often, and the built in sync keeps the page position for me.

I think they have a reasonable fear of updates adding some type of DRM shit

NTA but I share hus opinion. I live in south america, getting some books like notes from the underground was a fucking pain so instead I just downloaded them and put them in my e reader. Since it's backlit, it doesn't burn my eyes. I do prefer physical copies for taking outside and the general feel of books. Either way you don't need to give up one or the other, so both are great

IIRC the largest study only found an effect on remembering where in the book something occurred, and even that was weak.

Alright so I just got my Kobo Clara.

I like it, but I'm missing buttons, USB-C, a 7 inch screen, audiobook support, and waterproofing, so I think I'll return it for a Libra :p

It's honestly a really solid feeling and working device, I respect it, but with the Libra on sale, it isn't for me...

The feel of a real book is great, but e-readers beat them in every other category, and they're close enough to real paper. The convenience of being able to carry thousands of texts on one device that's easy on the eyes and lasts a long time is great. I was skeptical until I got one myself, they're actually quite nice, much better than reading on a phone or tablet.

>waterproofing
Why would your e-reader ever be in danger of water damage? Just don't be a tard.

I like the idea of being able to read on a pool floatie with zero worry in the world.

I'm not like my sister who, bless her heart, reads paper library books in the pool. I can't stomach that kind of risk, so I want waterproofing, simple as.