Book 'em Dano

A poll for those stumbling across my mumblings... do you prefer paper based books, electronic books, or a combination of the two?

I land pretty firmly in the electronic book area, though I can see some negative aspects of an all electronic information transfer system.

My older, cloudy eyeballs really like the whole changeable font thing you find with electronic books. When I look at most paper based books it seems like there is some type of publishers conspiracy to hide stuff from me. The Kindle or viewing on my computer solves that problem.

The ability to readily look up words and beam over to end notes and foot notes is also great for those like me with limited vocabularies.

My sleep when I was on various submarines might have been better if Kindles had been around then. I usually took lots of books with me. With limited personal storage space, I had to stow those books under my mattress (a mattress that was none too thick). This created a fairly lumpy sleeping environment. Lumpiness that would migrate as others borrowed and returned books.

The other positive aspect is the search-ability. With a brain that has been bounced, prodded and regularly marinated, my ability to firmly remember details is sometimes a pretty iffy proposition. Electronic formats allow me to readily search for previously read items to refresh the details while I'm reading something connected to it.

The biggest negative I can think of (I'm sure you all will provide more) is that electronic formats make the revising history subplot of '1984' much more feasible. Rounding up and destroying all the paper copies of any widely distributed bit of information can be quite a chore. Altering or disappearing electronic records is becoming more possible with each advance in interconnectedness.

The other negative (with most electronic books anyway) is the inability to loan out the book. If I buy a paper book I can read it, loan it to my friends to infect their brains and then we can gather around a table laden with nosh type foods, add liberal amounts of libations and argue about the ideas in that book until the wee hours of the morning. You can't really do that with the electronic versions.

Amazon, if you're listening out there... create a process/ability for an electronic book purchaser to loan a copy with it being erased from the loanee's computer/Kindle after a certain period of time designated by the loaner. Libraries might want to get wrapped around this idea also. This idea is feasible. Amazon already had the ability to remove items from your Kindle. Ironically, they did this with an unauthorized version of '1984', destroying some people's added notes in the process. Since they can also limit the number of devices a bought book appears on it would seem to be just a minor shift in process... instead of 5 authorized permanent devices, have 4 plus a loaner copy.

So, did you print this out on paper to read it or just absorb it directly from your computer screen?

..take care..t