Steven_Bukal writes:

I launched a project this week to replace [physical books] with digital versions which is moving at a decent rate of ten shelves a day.

Some questions, for anyone who uses digital books a lot: what readers -- both hardware and software -- do you recommend, and why? What determines whether you obtain a book on paper or as bits? Do you find the usability problems I list below?

I don't have an e-reader, although I do have computers and the Mac Kindle application. But I've never bought an e-book, because the convenience of a book that takes up no space has not yet outweighed the problems I see with them, even though the space that paper books take up is a major problem for me.

• An e-book can vanish into thin air if the publisher decides to un-publish it. This has actually happened.
• All the other obvious DRM issues.
• I can't easily consult half a dozen books at once.
• I can't flip through an e-book with anything like the convenience of a physical book.
• Until we get A3-sized Retina screens the visual bandwidth will be nothing like as great as with paper.
• The paper format has a record of compatibility of many times the entire history of computing. I have books that were manufactured more than a century ago, and they're as readable as when they came off the press.
• I've seen enough people's accounts of dreadful usability problems in the reading software to conclude that most of it is written by dolts.

I used to print out scientific papers for reading, but I stopped that some years ago and only print them now when there's something I need to study intensively, at which point most of those usability considerations kick in. At this point, I can't see myself buying e-books except for the sort of mid-list SF where I would drop the physical book in a charity bin after reading.