E-Books vs. Hard Copies

[j0eo]

i prefer hard copies if my university provides me, but also e-books if it's not available.

[MarkMP]

I just collect the ebooks. Not having to store the books in a physical place is a Huge bonus

[SuperDuperGoomba]

I tend to prefer Hard Copies, but that hasn't stopped me from hording ebooks like nobody's business.

[waregim]

The power issue is important. With a portable solar panel, a battery and an inverter you can go off grid with a library of congress sized collection of books and other media.

And if the grid goes down for any extended period (highly likely in an era for Forever Wars), your collection would be a valuable commodity.

[Temum]

Hard copy; once worked as a printer and binder, so I appreciate a well made book and spit at $200 hard cover math books with glued bindings which crack apart and spill pages on first opening (yeah, you, Springer). Also like the enduring physical substance of bound books over the existentially tenuous dependence on constant electrical flow for ebooks; and too much screen time is hard on my eyes, but I can read off paper all day and all night.  Many hard copy books are not available or too expensive for me. But even if I have a printed copy, which I prefer for reading, research is easier and faster to attain completeness and accuracy with ebooks.  For dissertation research, I did use digital image copies of 17th century English economics and accounting works, which would otherwise have been inaccessible to me, although the modern ebook facilities were unavailable too: the old style fonts, uneven lines, broken type, and inconsistent impression inking made OCR conversion for digital analysis not possible. One main exception: I have the 2 volume Compact edition of the OED (which I used to be able to read without the magnifying glass) but mainly use an installed ebook version on my laptop--but always check the printed work when editing research work. I acknowledge my dependence on and gratitude for ebooks, but as an "enthusiast" I voted only hard copy.

[astounded]

E-Book all the way for me.  I only started to use ebooks about 3-4 years ago on the kindle and although I found it really handy to look up words with the dictionary on the kindle I still quickly moved over to an iPad mini.  The iPad mini is just as easy to hold but is lightning fast compared to even the newest kindle and with instant lookup and return to reading.

Another plus is all books appear in all my ipads, iPhone and Macbook so easy access just about anywhere I go.

[grablinger]

Ebook, though I have about 10 of the real thing.

[vimcontrole]

I try to keep hard copies of important books. And collect thousands ebooks.

Books that i will need if the system fails, i keep hard copy.
As i think, as the State tends to burn books throught out the history of mankind and ebooks are so easy to change or simple to delete from the internet.
Here in my country i see the system failing at least once every year, water shortage for weeks, no energy for days, no food in the supermarket. The way things are going in the politics, it is just a matter of time to change books to adapt their ideology and delete the ones they dont like, they can control the ebook readers, why they wouldnt hack your pc and delete it for you for your own good, if there is no bad consequeces? Ebooks are very easy to become impossible to read. The system is so fragily. The cities is fragille too, if a govenador steal money that would go to the maintance of eletricity, it breaks the eletricity of the city. If one person decides to poison the water supply, byebye water for weeks, then i would have to go to the country where things are less "modern".

So i have one book at least per topic i need to survive in hard copies.
Agriculture, machinary, farming
Woodwork, tools
Animals, desieses, training, nutrition
Plants, medicine, nutrition, foraging
Eletronics, fixing things, software programing, radio, morse code, tap code
Medice, Fisioterapy, drugs, nutricion
Survival guidebook
Pottery, stone work
Beer making (of course)
Leather, clothers, etc
Home Security
Airplanes piloting
Guns
Phylosophy, literature, culture, entertainiment, drawing, music
Homeschooling, mathematics, physics, geography, so on...
Bible, fundamentals of surviving

This list keeps growing every year, and changing some books.
They are in two box so i can take with me.

The rest i read about work, college, computer, economics, news, cientific articles, i keep in the ebook reader as it is dependent of the system and i wont use it outside of the system.

[tcodee]

Ebook. I was against the idea, but I was running out f room.