BOOKS, TABLET or KINDLE?

[SV Bacchus]

Kindle for us with the Kindle reader app on iPhones, iPads and computers. Nice that they sync so if I'm reading late at night on the Kindle and knock off a few chapters but the next day I am waiting in a doctors I can pull out my phone and pick up where I left off.

Plus there is family sharing so all 3 of us can read all the books in the library on any of our devices.

[Alita49DS]

This is an enjoyably fascinating question. To which the answers are highly subjective and the variations nearly infinite. As they are contingent on not only ones own preferences but that of others on board and even location. A tablet can be well nigh useless in Med sun.

For my part, I use Kindle, tablet, phone and computer. The latter being a Surface which is therefore both a tablet and computer.

What might then help is to split written data into categories:

1. The admiral is not going to part with certain books and I am not going to argue with her. Forget the rationale or the joy of dumping tomes in the Marina office on those swap shelves. That is her prerogative.

2. Manuals for the boat. I now file each and every manual, from the sandwich maker upwards, into OneDrive. With downloaded copies on the PC that I use on the boat so that they are available offshore. Being in the Cloud means that I can get them on any internet connected device, cannot lose them and, most important of all, can find them without ferreting about at the bottom of s locker. Further, I can search the text. All this is infinitely more flexible on a PC where one can have multiple Windows and PDFs open than on a tablet. No tablet comes close.

3. Pilot books. Here I prefer paper. Anyway, since books are pretty you might as well use relevant ones for that nautical homely effect.

4. Novels and general reading matter. Thank you Amazon. When did you last're-read a novel but found it hard to bin it? Now I can read the same book on any of my devices and, if there is an internet connecting, be taken on the one to hand where I left off on the other. Most of us always carry a mobile phone so that book is always to hand. I tend to use that as the screen is large enough yet the device is small enough to pocket. In bright sunlight a Kindle is best. Kobo I am sure is physically as good but Kindle really has the market stitched up.

5. The tablet I find is best for newspapers and magazines as there are generally apps for Android and iOS. Might as well go for Android as Apple is a monopolistic rip off. Be interesting to see what the US Supreme Court decides about their store in the light of consumers suing them.

6. Charts. Discussed before here but is there really still anyone going on a long cruise who buys all the detailed paper charts? Rather than having a reserve large scale chart and the rest of the material on chart plotter, tablet and pilot book? All three of which are likely to be more accurate as they update.

I think that I am beginning to see the boat as a small material space rather like my life. I want to remove as much physical material from both as I can. Before I myself dematerialise.

[Mithril Bham]

Being old school I like the feel of paper but being practical every sq centimeter of space matters. Get a couple of ipads. Almost everything can be downloaded or scanned and more will be in the future.
Although a library is esthetically pleasing that space can be for efficiently utilized.

[toddster8]

I've been slowly converting a rather large library over to e-readers. Some random observations:

Perhaps a key question is whether there is a small set of critical printed books one should keep in case all electronics take a dump.

Nice-to-have but non-critical books whose authors just refuse to release in digital format (e.g. some cruising guides) do not get to stay on the boat for long.

If you don't watch them, the e-readers automatically put most of your books back up into "the cloud," so you have to re-download them to look something up. It's possible to download everything into permanent local storage, but it takes some effort. You don't want to be 40 or 1000 miles from the nearest cell tower and discover that you only have an icon of that reference manual, not the whole thing.

I tried to like Kobo, but had to give it up, because the app Just Didn't Work. Instead of reading, I was wasting all my time re-loading things and trying to find my place in a book.

I am really uncomfortable at dumping a lot of resources into proprietary format digital files that can only be read with a proprietary reader. Some Empty Suit at corporate HQ could have a snit or a sell-out and brick half my library in the middle of the night. Similar things have happened before. It may be a good idea to look into the e-book formats and try to convert all of your books into a common open format in backed-up local storage. Another way of looking at it is that it may be worth paying an extra dollar or two up front, as you grow your library, to get that book in a common format in the first place.

[toddster8]

And... books disintegrating in water, after a knockdown, and clogging the pumps was recently cited as a factor in a decision to abandon. Just saying...

[250224]

Originally Posted by Alita49DS

Might as well go for Android as Apple is a monopolistic rip off

A very nice post. I agree with everything except for the above quoted part.

Android is worse a million times (imho). Android, i.e. Google is an advertisment-swine which takes pleasure to dissect your whole life. They aggregate everything: contacts, email, location, purchases (credit cards), search... And did you take note how sneaky Google behaves to make you give away location and other data when configuring the phone?

Why do you accept to just be a cheap product and let a huge corporation invade your privacy for profit? (But ok, I admit, it's a precarious situation, I don't like Apple's behaviour either. Bad options for us consumers I guess )

With this, PHONES have been included into the subject...

[toddster8]

Regarding the formats, I didn't want to get into conclusions about specific brands. In part because this stuff is all too fluid. The last time I delved into it, it was easier to transport other formats into Apple iBooks, which uses a variation of the common ePub format. BUT, Apple is also notorious for suddenly dropping insufficiently profitable products and features and pretending that they never existed. I have nothing against DRM, I just wish there was a standard format that would work with any device.

[Macblaze]

The real answer this depends on how and what you read and will likely mean you need all three at one point or another.

Reference: A tablet (with as big a screen as you can afford) is likely the best answer for being able to look things up in a technical manual. But no...you can't count on all manuals being converted to a pdf format.

Reading Manuals: But reading a manual cover to cover on a tablet is still painful so I suggest any actual reading of technical documents that you wish to do should probably be in book form. Its still the easiest and most efficient way to absorb large amounts of formatted information and data.

Reading for pleasure: Definitely an ebook. Personally I steer away from Kindles and Amazon because all their stuff is in proprietary formats and they have some pretty ugly attitudes towards their ownership rights. A Kobo, or any number of other ereaders that read epub format is a better bet in my book. But if you're not the bibliophile type then any dedicated ereader will do...they are easier on the eyes and have much better battery life than tablets.

Having said all that, all my digital reading material is loaded on my phone, my ipad, my laptop and my ereader. The best book is the one you have with you when you want to read it.

[SVRocinante]

I'd hate to say it, but we have all 3!

That said, the number of books have been drastically reduced and very few new ones come aboard; typically those that I can not find electronically and fall into the "I want them" category for either myself or my wife.

Our primary devices are Kindles - we subscribe to Kindle unlimited and our public library has an extensive electronic catalog.

iPad is used as an alternate kindle reader on occasion, but my primary reading app is Zinio for my magazines.

Hope this helps,

[denverd0n]

I'll add... The best thing about having an e-reader is gutenberg.org. They have a HUGE collection of public-domain books available for free. Virtually any piece of classic literature is available there. I had no idea how good Charles Dickens really was until I started downloading his novels from gutenberg.org! And he's not the only one... Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and, yes, even Jane Austen.

[DrDelmas]

Kindle for reading, easy to read, not as heavy to hold. I keep a few books on hand to exchange with others.

[apirate]

I agree that it's good to have hard copies of the technical books. For all others I love my Kindle.

Recently we held an estate sale to prepare to move aboard. I'll admit, it made me a bit sad to see how few people looked at our books. Today's world is a digital one, although I still love the feel of a good book.

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

I'll add... The best thing about having an e-reader is gutenberg.org. They have a HUGE collection of public-domain books available for free. Virtually any piece of classic literature is available there. I had no idea how good Charles Dickens really was until I started downloading his novels from gutenberg.org! And he's not the only one... Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and, yes, even Jane Austen.

It's worth mentioning there is a new project called Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/) that is starting to update and convert a lot of the Gutenberg ebooks. A lot of them have pretty poor standards of typography and ebook design and can be off-putting to try and read. Standard Ebooks hasn't too large of a catalog yet but they are worth looking at first before you go to Gutenberg and they are adding more all the time.

[ppvora]

I don't want to come across as a Luddite (and I'm not) but if your book life expectancy (how long you expect to be able to read a certain book -- of course there's some uncertainty there) is more than X years (you pick X) then I would stick to paper or pdf. Paper is highly unlikely to become obsolete. pdf files will become obsolete but at some fairly distant time in the future.

Why paper or pdf? Amazon will go bankrupt some day (study IBM closely -- yes, it hasn't yet but sometime it will) and so will Apple. What if they go bankrupt well before X years have passed? Will you consider buying those books over again in some other format?

Although Adobe Systems is the creator of the pdf format, there are many free and open-source pdf readers, so pdf readers will likely be available for a long time after the demise of Amazon and Apple.

[dwedeking2]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

I'll add... The best thing about having an e-reader is gutenberg.org. They have a HUGE collection of public-domain books available for free. Virtually any piece of classic literature is available there. I had no idea how good Charles Dickens really was until I started downloading his novels from gutenberg.org! And he's not the only one... Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and, yes, even Jane Austen.

If you use Amazon go to their kindle category and do a search for the subject you like. Then sort by price - lowest to highest. I just downloaded 500 free books to my kindle.