This may be on a thread I missed, or may be missing the point altogether, but I still have my doubts about buying ebooks. To my way of thinking, ten years from now you can still reach for a standard book on the shelf, pick it up and practice magic off its pages. An ebook seems more fleeting (ethereal?) -- and far less accessible than a "book" book: your computer is required to read it, and you can't take an ebook to the beach or on the subway. And if you want to print off a bunch of pages/chapters, you run into ink and paper costs, and thereby simultaneously turn the ebook back into the form of a -- koff koff -- a book!

Another thing. Is my fear that ebooks will go the way of the dodo bird, the beta video, or the eight-track tape unfounded? You all seem so happy and untroubled! I do like the much lower co$t. What's wrong with me?

Thanks!

- Padraig

There is nothing wrong with you, you're absolutely right. If I want tot practice a trick that is in an e-book, the first thing I do is hit the ' print' button.
The same with newspapers and the electronic versions of them.

Big plus of ebooks however is the fast delivery and the postage. Sometimes I buy at Amazon a book of $12 and have to pay $6 for postage.

Frans

I feel that the convenience of delivery and lower cost offset some of the disadvantages of the media. Although books are nice (I have several shelves full of them) my hard drive right now contains more instantly accessable information of some classics and obscure editions that are no longer available in print (thank you Lybrary.com !)

Padraig, ebooks have both advantages and disadvantages. Everyone has to decide for themselves if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The main reasons why I love ebooks are:
- they are searchable and this is very important for me
- they are typically cheaper than books which isn't something I sneeze at
- I can have all of them on a memory stick or on my laptop and essentially always with me regardless of where I go.
- some come with embedded video clips and other multimedia contents which makes learning a lot easier and enjoyable

And there a couple of other nice to have. The disadvantages are:

- there is no physical object to hold and caress. For me this is not important but for some this is a big deal
- one has to be more careful to not loose it, but with a good backup strategy it is not really a problem

For me, the advantages more than outweigh the disadvantages. I love ebooks and I am convinced they are the future for a host of reasons. There are things that still need to improve, but ebooks have reached a level where we are beyond the beta-max or eight-track problem.

Best,
Chris....
http://www.lybrary.com

The old fashioned paper book will not die anytime too soon (the fan club is too big). And there is something soothing about sitting back with a good book and reading through it's pages.
The e-book also has a few advantages of it's own. My favorite is video clips that allow me to actualy see and hear a little of what I am reading about.
Iven

Searchability used to be a big plus with Lybrary.com books. Since going over to PDF books, the search function is Adobe's very slow and clunky one. On the other hand, PDF seems to work on more machines and formats well for printing. Six of one/half dozen of the other.

*jeep!
-Granpa Chet (Who misses the HTML and iSilo formats.)

Chet, one of the reasons for Lybrary.com to migrate to PDF was that surprisingly many don't know how to unzip a file which holds files and subfolders which was necessary for the HTML ebooks. This caused on my end a large amount of customer service. On top of that the various browsers and incompatibilities in Javascript required frequent updates and corrections. And a good number of customers print out their ebooks. Printing from HTML does not produce the nice print outs PDF allow. For better or worse, PDF has established itself as the ebook format.

But if search speed is your major issue with PDF, then there are a few suggestions I have besides upgrading to a faster computer

1) Use a 3rd party desktop search tool. I use Copernic which indexes even the largest PDF files (Google desktop only indexes the first pages). The search is lightning fast.

2) If you go in Acrobat/AcrobatReader to Edit->Preferences->Search make sure the Fast Find feature is enabled. Acrobat caches some of the work it does to search. A subsequent search for a different term in the same PDF or group of PDFs will be a lot faster than the firts one.

3) If your Acrobat has the Catalog feature (Advanced->Catalog) you can build indexes for your PDFs and then your search will be lightning fast.

4) Take a look into iFilter which also builds an index for PDFs under Windows. I have never tried this myself so can't tell you too much about it.

Bottom line, there are a number of ways to speed up your searching.

Best,
Chris....

I prefer reading books more to reading ebooks cause reading on the screen can be really tiring at times.

However, I do get ebooks mainly because some of these materials cannot be gotten elsewhere. If you don't get ebooks, you can miss out on some pretty good learning materials that you would otherwise have liked very much.

And as I see it, I don't think PDFs are going to go extinct anytime soon at all. They're too commonly used. Additionally, even if the time came when they are phased out. I'm sure technology will be readily available to convert these files to the newer existing ones.

One solution for the "ethereal" or "fleeting" nature of e-books would be to have all your e-books (and everyone else's) stored on the Internet (where they are already), and to have access to "your" e-books from any computer anywhere that is connected to the Net. I believe Google will have something like this available for us in the not too distant future. A less satisfactory solution along these same lines would be that you could access your e-books from the seller any time (and from any Internet-connected computer) you wanted. The seller would "know" that you have already purchased the e-book, so you could access it again for free. The risk here, obviously, is that the seller could go out of business or be inaccessible for some reason.

Some day computer users will look back at our "quaint" ways of storing data such as documents, e-mail, e-books and videos and wonder how we kept track of it all. However, they will still have their own (much smaller) libraries of certain private material they will not want to "upload" to their Internet-based storage areas. Paranoia and privacy will always be with us.

CM

Chris,

Lybrary.com does have exactly what you are describing. We call it the digital shelf. The ebooks you purchase are also available online in your Lybrary.com account and can thus be viewed from any computer connected to the Internet. You can even share comments/images with other owners of the same ebook and with the author of the ebook, too.

However, this feature is still in beta version and only a limited number of ebooks are accessible through the digital shelf. In the future this will be extended to include more of our ebooks.

Best,
Chris....