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Comment by wolco2 | Hacker News Reader

Books, newspapers, magazines. Old physical medium is slowly phasing itself out. It's sad time is moving on but if you told me in the 90s I can have a single flatsheet off paper that will get the latest news from the internet daily I would be amazed. With phones I have a flatsheet that gets new pages by touching a screen. A virtual keyboard appears. I feel like I'm in the future.

Maybe we shouldn't look down on the progress we all tried so hard to make. It's not bad..

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For all the advantages of reading with a screen, it hasn’t yet supplanted all the benefits of a printed book. For instance, flipping back and forth between two or three pages is much easier and faster with a printed book. Put your finger in the book, read, flip back, read.

Versus, say, a reader app: Bookmark the page. Go to the other page (perhaps by “Go to page...”), bookmark that page. Now click “bookmarks” and select the first page, read, click bookmarks, select the second page, read. And that assumes you don’t already have so many bookmarks that you have to scroll.

I can write in a book. I can forget it behind and it’ll probably be there (and if not, it’s probably cheaply replaced). I can lend it. etc

I love my e-reader, but I still need (and love) books.

ebooks are fine if you're mostly just reading linear text. They're also mostly good if they're just a reference that you're looking things up in. They tend to be less good when there are a lot of photos/graphics (though I've mostly made peace with well-designed guidebooks), footnotes, and things you want to bookmark a lot like cookbooks.

Aye. My reader (which is one of clutch of Sony Readers I'm keeping alive, which for various reasons ended up my preferred reader) is an excellent substitute for a stack of novels I'll read front to back, and that's it. The reader wins on weight and volume, which for a stack of novels is a serious inconvenience.

For everything else thus far, the paper version wins.

But it opens the door to centralized censorship and control of the present and past unlike ever before.

Before the web, centralization meant you couldn't get published unless you made a one sided deal if you were lucky with a publisher. You would have to buy 2,000 copies yourself and try to sell that out of a car.

When amazon opened that up it allowed anyone to publish and now we have other smaller sites like smashworlds that offer similiar.

Things are now so much more open as a publisher.

On the selling side you had smaller book stores being pushed out by Chapters. Chapters bought up many book chains and pushed out many smaller shops with better prices.

When Amazon came in they were fighting against the big box stores and they won.

Things appear centralized with Amazon but you can sell your ebook from anywhere (from your site/app/newsletter) you couldn't do that before. Everyone wants easy Amazon sales.

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