Kids see you reading an e-book, they don't know what you're doing, they just see you staring at s phone.

Kids see you reading a physical book, they see you're reading, and what you're reading. It helps foster a love of reading in them.

If the question is one DRM-free ebook vs. one physical book, I'd say the physical book. If the question is 100 vs. 100, or 1000 vs. 1000, ebooks all the way.

I'm really not concerned with a physical book deteriorating in my lifetime because I'm not going to leave it out to be weathered or bend the spine until it falls apart. Space is a bigger issue. Right now if I like an ebook I'll buy the physical copy to display it at home like art.

I despise reading a book on a screen. Ebooks are inferior to physical books from a typical usage standpoint.

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.

Books don't require power or any complicated electronics to be of use.

Mostly an advantage in some apocalypse or stranded on a deserted island scenario.

@throwawayacc0430

Wouldn't say always better but as long as there will be e-readers and you get accustomed to them I say yes they are better...

As far as DRM-free...you certainly will not get as good a selection (even though I dislike DRM and PDF)

Depends? You can also copy a book exactly (i.e. word for word, not photocopying), and digital media also deteriorates.

Digital media deteriorates faster in cold storage than a physical book, but is easier to copy.

Properly stored: CDs die anywhere between 10 and 30 years. Some flash drives last 10. Magnetic storage 10-20 years. Books hunders of years.

I'd say physical books are safer against deterioration because it can handle a few generations of "forgetting about it" while a digital copy needs regular backup maintenance.

Certainly not for public libraries

Can't prop open a door with an e-book.

Ebooks are superior for the task of reading. The ability to check out books (or steal them) from home is a big deal.

If nostalgia, being seen reading, or collecting books is your jam, rock on reader. But don't look down on me because I value the built in dictionary and changing the font.

Why not both? I download any physical book I read for my digital library. Nice tracker of what I've read too.

In terms of preservation, digital media is surely superior if you use it right (i.e. using long-lasting storage media, backups and error detection).

But, some people prefer physical books just for the experience. Also physical books don't need electricity.

Also, a DRM-free ebook may still miss some layout or images compared to a printed copy, depending on the format and how good it's made.

All in all, I still prefer e-books.

'Better' is a subjective judgement - for me the answer is absolutely not, I'll always prefer a real physical book.

For others the answer will be yes, and for yet others it'll be maybe or sometimes.

There's no objectively true answer to the question though.

the ereader i have doesn't handle images well at all. if you're reading a book with a photo or map or anything that isn't coded text, then it sucks. my current book has some text that was scanned as images-- i have to zoom in and drag the screen to read it, and the refresh/"frame rate" for e-ink is inherently terrible. a tablet would solve this, if i didn't care about privacy

Digital media deteriorates too, it can be corrupted subtly or obviously and it can fail catastrophically. Backups and archival especially over the very long term are not simple or straightforward, it's easy to make mistakes and for accidents to happen and a broken link in the chain can lead to the failure of the whole chain.

"Defense in depth" is a good principle to rely on here. Digitization of physical media media makes sense and the risks are on the whole probably easier to avoid since keeping multitudes of digital copies is logisticially trivial compared to making physical copies. But that doesn't mean it's without risks, and may fail against risks that a physical copy wouldn't. Both is better than either one, and either one is better than none.

In the moment, yes.

However, the longevity of digital data is problematic. Computers have existed for less then a 100 years, but you'd already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape.

Modern protocols and formats are much more complex, so I'd say that reading your data in 100 years will be harder then reading 100 year old data today. Have a look at a pdf in a text editor. Imagine trying to figure that out once the documentation is lost. (... or stored in the pdf)

Without continual efforts to convert data or preserve hardware and software, the data will be lost.

Compare that to written documents. We have writing that's thousands of years old, and it's still legible and understandable. We have paper documents about as old as we've been able to make the stuff.

Depends on the file format.

It depends on the book.

One of my favorite books is Good Omens (obligatory fuck Neil Gaiman). I have multiple print copies of various editions. I have multiple digital copies. The digital copies all suck because the footnotes, which are arguably the best parts of the book, are always at the end of the book rather than at the bottom of the pages. I also love to read Good Omens by picking up a copy, opening to a random page, and begin reading there.

I also read a lot of TTRPG books, I read digital copies in bed on my iPad. For actual game I always prefer a physical copy.

I also have a copy of a 200+ year old catechism book from my family.

Not of you like the smell of books. So no, not always.

I far prefer the reading experience of a hardcover book to an ereader. It's easier to see the text, flip pages, and getting books from a physical library is a lot easier than using some online service to browse for something I would like to read.

It depends on your needs. The typography and image quality is much superior for print than ebooks usually. That being said, I still get ebooks for large reference books so I can search them and copy/paste, eg programming related books. I also read foreign language ebooks so I can lookup the meaning of any word I don't know with my phone's dictionaries, or translate a phrase or sentence.

Not when you're cold and need to start a fire