Ebook or Paper

[Magman]

I bought myself a Sony Palm reader over a year ago. I must admit I have read about double the amount of books I normally read in a few (About 2 dozen now). Mainly from the ease of acquiring the books from online and the convience of carry 1 little device around with the capability of 1000's of books on it.

Though I will always remain a fan of paper. The feel and smell of them can't be overcome in an electronic device.

I have been a long time fan of Raymon E. Fiest and his Rift War Saga's. Excellence read if you haven't already been blessed to read them. I have most of his novel on my ebook.

[Matt-M-McElroy]

I have quickly become a huge fan of eBooks.

I write reviews and do some freelance work, which means I see a lot of books each month (so having instant access to these products with search enabled is a big plus).

I'm also in the middle of moving and am very tired of carrying boxes of books. So far I'm to 40 boxes of books moved from the old place to the new and I'm not done yet.

Moving my laptop and backup hard drive with the 300+ eBooks on them was a lot easier...

-Matt

[Pegritz]

I'm a big fan of paper books, and would like to become a fan of ebooks, as well...but there are far too many issues with ebooks that turn me off of the medium entirely:

1. Ebook readers are clumsy, ugly, and their screens are either too dim or of too low resolution. Jagged, unaliased type is extremely hard on my eyes.

2. I despise all the DRM bullshit that most ebooks are saddled with. I refuse to pay for something that will be chained to one device only.

Now, that said, I've found a lot of texts online in PDF format which I read easily enough on my computer screen using Adobe Acrobat. The bookmarking and annotation capabilities of the PDF format are awesome, and I look forward to a time when an ebook reader device is capable of displaying high-resolution PDFs. Then, and only then, will I consider getting one...but only if there's a way to hack the DRM system.

[ShannonA]

I generally find etexts great for reference, but terrible for reading.

I'm quite happy when I just want to look up a short section or phrase (though within the smaller world of an ebook as opposed to the internet, this becomes more problematic).

However, if I want to actually read something, nothing yet beats the form factor of paper.

[Fritzef]

Another vote for paper.

I want to like e-books, I really do. My (and my wife's) book collection is spread across 3 rooms in the building where we work (2 offices and a library-ish room) and I don't know how many rooms in our house. I worry about the weight of the books and its effect on the beams in some places.

But I've never found an electronic text that I want to read for more than a couple of pages. Even journal articles or chapters from things on Google Books I typically print out and read on paper.

[Joebot]

It's tough to beat the "technology" of a book -- it's cheap, lightweight, easily portable, and DRM-free, you can easily mark your place and make notes, and if you live near a library, they're free. No high-tech gadget can yet match that feature set.

That being said, as others have noted, I WANT to like e-books. It's one of those things that sounds cool ... but nobody has really figured out how to do it. The Amazon Kindle supposedly has a good wireless service, but the hardware looks like the bastard love-child of an Etch-a-Sketch and a graphing calculator. I think Apple probably could make a slick device if they wanted to, but as of yet, they've shown no interest in that market. An Apple book reader using their multi-touch technology from the iPhone sounds potentially cool. Oooh, and if the screen was big enough to read comics on, I'd be very interested ...

[Eilonwy]

I do like the instant gratification of eBooks...I've bought quite a few fiction mags from fictionwise lately. Where I currently live, it's a bit of a drive just to buy Asimov's, forget about small-press litmags. So when they sell an eBook, it makes it a lot easier on me. I still haven't read any books in eBook form, and I don't see it happening any time soon. With a periodical, I can read one story and then go do something else for a while, just like reading a story or article on the web...with a book, I want to carry the paper artefact around.