During its early days (2009), an investor showed me a white Kindle reading a book. This was India, long before Amazon was even introduced to our country. I decided to get mine a few years later. I decided to move bag and baggage to ebooks. After some time, I got one for my daughter too. Then the Kindle Oasis was, to me, one of the best ways to read books.

But I realize that I have a better and cozier feeling holding a physical book to read. As I get older, that also means I cannot deal with Paperbacks (especially in India where the quality is as bad as it gets). Buying only Hardcovers makes me choose my books wisely and feel immensely satisfied reading books.

Unfortunately, with all the things happening with Amazon—Kindle, I have done away with Kindle and sold them except for a Paperwhite that I want as my gadget/device museum piece.

I have too many books that I want to get back to, so I might just keep one but looks like Amazon is not making it easy to archive books.

Now, I’m on a lookout for an Open Source but well designed eBook Reader, akin to the Framework computers but for ebooks. I would like to still keep the physical to ebook ratio to a good number; for every 5 ebooks, I should have at-least 2 physical ones.

Never. It never makes sense to me, why would I want to carry around another computer to read? Why can’t I unplug and enjoy my book? I tried it, it sucked and management was even worse.

> At some point you just have to move to Ebooks.

This is a parallel story for me to vinyl / streaming for music

There are some books and albums I want as physical artefacts, their aesthetic and tactile presence in my world means something more than just the content, you're right, the smell, the art, their feel

Then there are some that are _just_ content, they get streamed and bought as ebooks for just convienence and consumption

> At some point you just have to move to Ebooks.

When I can get a godsdamned file and view it on whatever I want with whatever program I want, sure. But I usually can’t.

Where do you find e-books that are several times cheaper than paperback? Sometimes they're half the price, but often they aren't cheaper at all.

And that assumes you find a DRM free copy at all.

I have plenty of ebooks, and the main advantage there, for me, is the info density. But there are still advantages to paper books. For one thing, I can't have my paper books revoked after purchase, something that happened to me more than once on amazon before I wised up and started downloading my books to my PC (before they went and made that impossible). I don't shop at amazon much for anything these days but it could happen anywhere with DRM. (which is another advantage; I don't have to waste time stripping the DRM off of paper books).

For another thing, I don't need to worry about charging a paper book and I don't need to have a battery pack and cables to read a book if the power is out or I'm somewhere without electricity. That's probably not a concern for most of the folks on HN but I personally prefer having a reduced infrastructural dependence for certain activities.

Reading on a screen also destroys my attention span. Again, that's not necessarily a common concern for most people but if I'm reading anything heavier than Raymond Chandler, I feel like my brain turns to oatmeal on an e-reader or a computer screen.

> It's way cheaper (usually ~6x cheaper)

I have hundreds of books. All but... I dunno, fewer than a hundred, were purchased used. Tens of the ones purchased new, were cheap Dover Thrift editions (they're so cheap that if you're paying shipping on used, you can often pay barely-more and just buy new).

Ebooks only improve my costs if I pirate.

If I squint my eyes I can maybe picture my self reading parts of 5 different books in a single day. A fiction novel (1), a Japanese textbook (2), a Japanese vocab book (3), a coffee table book I just happen to need a particular trivia from (4), and a mushroom hunting book (5).

Usually I know exactly which book I need for a given occasion: Sitting on a bus for a while = take my fiction; waiting in a ferry line = take my Japanese textbook; going mushroom hunting = mushroom book obv.

I don’t think I’ve ever been at a place where I did bring a book but wished I had brought a different book. And as such I have a hard time seeing the value in being able to access my entire library wherever I want.