![]() ![]() ![]() I’m sure that once upon a time people sighed wistfully at the memory of being the first to read a book and having the joy of cutting the pages with a small knife. ![]() People tend to wax poetic about the sensual experience of book reading and the smell and the feel of the pages. I don’t think I’d care to do a problem set from an ebook where I had to flip back and forth from the problem to the relevant text to the various tables of constants and equations. For that matter since I can’t see how thick the book is when I buy it, I’d like there to be a word count in the catalog description. It seems to me like there ought to be a current word counter. On other ebooks they are more like meaningless record locators, since the “pages” are clearly quite small and the book has more than a thousand of them. With some ebooks, these numbers seem to make sense to me in the sense that they are probably about right for a print edition of the book. ![]() My Nook offers “page numbers” that are invariant with the particular formatting options. One wonders if that is true for kids who are more accustomed to ebooks from the start. I’ve seen an article describing a study that suggests that people are better able to encode material in their head if they know where it is on the page and roughly what page it is on, so a physical book with a fixed layout may offer a retention advantage. Its one thing to slide from one page to another, but much better (and easier) to flip back and forth and hold your place with a real book. ![]()
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