I don't know about this. There are a lot of considerations and trade offs, and simplifying the difference it too much usually a sign that someone doesn't understand the problem or is biased towards a position and wants you to be also.
Paper books have a fantastic UX. A book comes with all the information you want and also the renderer, and the interface is so intuitive that anyone that has even a vague understanding of what writing is can tell exactly what it is and how it is used, no tutorial necessary.
They're huge though, humongous, and they degrade. What we do with electronic books is re-use the renderer and only store the data separately, and this means that we don't have to instantiate the renderer with every set of data, this saves tremendous amounts of resources and space. Imagine every book you could ever want to read on one piece of paper, that's the limit of where this electronic book thing can go.
But the hardware is not passive, so using it consumes resources, and non passive things tend to degrade faster, and formats degrade (for some reason, I think financial reasons, can we settle on a format already? Let's do epub), storage hardware degrades...
I personally like electronic books. If we can come up with some type of cheap, small, long lasting storage hardware, like microSD cards but much, much longer lasting, settle on a format that can store basically any writing and drawing you could want (gzipped LaTeX and PNG anyone?) and reading devices that consume miniscule amounts of power, have no moving parts, are cheap and render well, I think we have a winning combination.
Paper books have a fantastic UX. A book comes with all the information you want and also the renderer, and the interface is so intuitive that anyone that has even a vague understanding of what writing is can tell exactly what it is and how it is used, no tutorial necessary.
They're huge though, humongous, and they degrade. What we do with electronic books is re-use the renderer and only store the data separately, and this means that we don't have to instantiate the renderer with every set of data, this saves tremendous amounts of resources and space. Imagine every book you could ever want to read on one piece of paper, that's the limit of where this electronic book thing can go.
But the hardware is not passive, so using it consumes resources, and non passive things tend to degrade faster, and formats degrade (for some reason, I think financial reasons, can we settle on a format already? Let's do epub), storage hardware degrades...
I personally like electronic books. If we can come up with some type of cheap, small, long lasting storage hardware, like microSD cards but much, much longer lasting, settle on a format that can store basically any writing and drawing you could want (gzipped LaTeX and PNG anyone?) and reading devices that consume miniscule amounts of power, have no moving parts, are cheap and render well, I think we have a winning combination.