Beyond any possible nostalgia for the paper medium, the monitor and the desktop, or laptop, have simply not reached the level of comfort in a physical sense as that achived by the humble dead-tree book. And even more so than normal reading, the process of brainstorming requires maximum comfort for the ideas to flow freely.

Digital books are often said to be the future because of their “convenience”. As far as I’m concerned until better devices for reading digital material are invented (I have high hopes for digital paper) digital books are highly inconvenient: power issues, form-factor issues, eye-strain issues, the list goes on.

I have no doubt we will some day soon have a great digital solution which might wean us away from the paper book to a large extent. I’m just not convinced the current technology is close to that solution.

There’s an interesting discussion of this by users over at Slashdot: eBooks – What’s Holding You Back?
As is characteristic of Slashdot, there’s a lot of noise on that page, but some interesting points and points-of-view are hidden in the mess.

It made me think of my partner and her course readings at university. Some of her courses offer all the readings online but of course she and many other students still choose to print these out before reading. The physical substance definitely makes things seem more substantial and sometimes more meaningful.