What do you prefer? Reading traditionally printed books, enjoying that distinctive smell of well aged paper, or reading digital books, having them all stored conveniently in one place (device)? Or both?
I prefer printed books. Yes, I do get a lot of enjoyment out of the texture and smell of a book, especially a new book. You open the front cover and you get that waft of the ink on paper. I do have a lot of ebooks, for convenience when I have to be away from home, since it is all in one place and is obviously easier to carry, but I do prefer printed books. It's storage of those that has become the issue. And I still keep buying them. They are my comfort. And I require a lot of comfort... That's my excuse and I am sticking to it!
I have a basic e-reader. It's okay for the dentist's waiting room, because he has dull magazines and duller patients - no good conversations to eavesdrop on. I do most of my reading at home: fiction in bed; non-fiction with meals. Neither venue is convenient or comfortable for holding a plastic box. Real books stay put where they're put. Also, it's a lot easier to page back where I want to check whether two statements correspond or how often he's made the same specious argument.
I guess that I'll say 'both'. I think that paper books are a lot more user friendly. I like the feel of them and can move more freely around them, flipping pages from chapter to chapter. I like looking at them on my bookshelf. One of my little joys in life is spending hours browsing in obscure and dusty academic bookstores (sadly harder and harder to find in our brave new world) and discovering books that I never knew existed, some on subjects I never knew existed. I'm not as young as I used to be and paper books typically have larger print than the print on a little e-reader screens. And I don't have to think about whether a paper book is charged up and they never hit me with a battery low warning. But on the e-reader's side, I've been able to find no end of free content in pdf format on the internet, ranging from entire e-books through all sorts of journal articles. I've found that I never buy e-books from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whereever. I probably already have enough material on my thumb-drives to keep me reading for rest of my life.
