15
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I mean, books deteriorate, a file can be copied and backed up. There's no doubt DRM-Free Ebooks are superior, right? Is there anything I'm missing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

No. In fact, I'd say hardly ever.

We have books that are thousands of years old. Without explicitly copying and translating formats, media, etc., I wouldn't count on any digital format to survive more than a century - and probably be undecipherable at the end of it anyway. Some scholars have suggested that we're in the midst of what will be a digital dark age because of this very reason.

Let's also consider the sort of degradation that can creep in. I've got a 110 year old document I'm deciphering at the moment, and there are parts of letters where the ink has faded or the paper has torn. I can usually make out from the remaining bits what the letter should be. You've probably done this on old letters: "Is that an 'a' or an 'o'? On the other hand, if I have a lower-case f in UTF-32, its binary representation is "00000000000000000000000001100110." If I have minor data corruption, one or more of those bits will flip (1-->0 or 0-->1). Since it could be anywhere in the sequence, I could end up with something totally unrelated to an 'f' either in character shape or alphabetic proximity.

Then there's the reading, indexing, and searching abilities in a physical book - no "add a bookmark" feature compares to sticking a finger on the page you want to flip back to, or comparing a few pages side-by-side. Physical bookmarks, stickies, or earmarking (noooo!) are all ways that people reference books which don't translate well.

Visually, lit displays are harder on our eyes than paper books in good ambient light.

e-books of course have some advantages, especially for technical material. Being able to hit "ctrl-f" and search for a single word or phrase is incredibly valuable. Constant updates of product documentation means not having to throw away books whenever a new version of the item/software is released. Linking to references (e.g. dictionary lookup) is much more convenient than going to get another book out.

But for just sitting down and reading, the tactile experience of a real book rules over everything else in my opinion. Sitting in a coffee shop with a book in hand is a profoundly human experience. Walking through the endless aisles of books at a library is both inspiring and humbling.

So in short, yeah - there is HUGE doubt that e-books are superior.

this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
15 points (68.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

41000 readers
1636 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS