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Comment by veddox | Hacker News Reader

Glad to hear it, even though I am not really surprised.

eBooks have several well-known advantages, but for all their worth and utility, there are some areas in which they just cannot match real books.

To name but one: multi-sensory input. Humans are designed to experience the world around them with as many senses as possible. Physical books can stimulate up to four of our five senses. Sight (obviously), hearing (the rustling of pages), touch (the feel of paper, the relative thickness of the part of the book you've already read vs. what is still unread) and (especially on older books) smell.

eBooks only really offer sight, and, to a very limited extent, touch. That this paucity of sensuous input does not satisfy us as much as a physical book should not come as a surprise.

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Aside from sensory immersion etc, paper books are just easier to flip through, have higher resolution, and generally look nicer.

And there's the simple fact that sitting somewhere with a book makes you look pretty cool whereas sitting there with a Kindle makes you look like a dork.

Also, paper books can be shared, lent, given, and they exist as nice physical objects instead of as these weird ephemeral files that Amazon can probably delete at any time.

When I walk into a person's house and see a book shelf I look to see what titles are there. Or, I look to see who and what people are reading in a coffee shop. The reason is that I like to know what people are thinking. I don't get that from a Kindle.

That's true, ereaders don't broadcast your "intellectual worth" and interests as much as bookshelves do. It's also not a conversation starter ("a biography of John Major, really?").

I wonder if it's something that could be solved with some sort of integration with those "smart frames" that show your family pictures.

This said, I don't agree with ereaders making people "look like dorks" -- pretty much everyone in a coffee shop these days is glued to a screen; be it a laptop, phone, tablet or reader, the look is exactly the same (well, unless you're rocking some huge "portable 386" from 1995, in which case you look either nuts or "oh so retro").

The biggest problem I see with eBooks is that they are basically only useable with plain-text.

Once e-ink displays master color and formatting (probably pretty soon) I would not want to use a physical book anymore. Just a few benefits: adjust text size and zoom, flip pages easier, smaller and lighter, take all your books with you, read thousands of free books...

The killer feature for me is the built-in dictionary. If I've been using my kindle heavily for a while, when I switch back to a paper book, I find myself tapping on unknown words on the page, half expecting the definition to pop up...

Like I said, eBooks do have many advantages, and yes, I do love my own eReader. None of which means that I would want to miss out on my library of real books, though ;-)

Another major benefit I could have mentioned is that you learn better reading a physical book as compared to an eBook (http://www.businessinsider.com/you-remember-books-better-tha...). Again, a lot of that has to do with multi-sensory input.

A lot of the research papers linked in that sources of that article are comparing reading a book vs a computer screen, not specifically on a kindle like device. A kindle would given you more multi-sensory input just by the fact you're holding it like the book compared to a 80s computer monitors in the research papers.

Good point. Some other research papers that use tablets and e-ink readers found no significant learning benefit as compared to paper:

http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA289721760&si...

http://search.proquest.com/openview/f98bc7b7d8194ba66b948d94...

(Found after a quick Google Scholar search, there's probably a lot more material out there.)

Although I still think eReaders are more limited than physical books as far as sensory input is concerned, it appears that the difference is small enough not to make a serious dent on learning.

My anecdata is that paper and eink are pretty similar, and definitely superior to screens and tablets. Then again, I grew up studying on paper; it might well be different for my kids.

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