I am currently reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond. I picked up a paper version of the book in a Utrecht bookstore two months ago, while browsing book shelves.
So far I find it fascinating, and I’ve been annotating quite a bit. For the next stage of working through those annotations I realised I might want to also buy the e-book version, so I can digitally connect source text and annotations together, lift out quotes etc.
Do you at times use the paper and e-version of the same book in parallel?
For this book I enjoy being able to easily inspect the structure and main topics, using the paper book. But lifting out the smaller parts that speak to me would be more easily done from the e-book.
Or perhaps I should do all that first by hand as I do normally, and only then start down the exploratory path I feel brewing behind what I’m reading and thinking. I’m not entirely sure what I’m after here, the ability to switch easier from analog to digital, to actually combine the prime affordances of both? Or is it seeking faster gratification from exploring notes, rather than first work through the source material?
The cost of course doubles more or less if you do this. So likely it only applies to books that trigger a more intensive engagement with their contents.
@ton Never. I’ve basically abandoned paper texts. They’re too expensive, they’re too heavy to carry around with me, and I can’t search through them. If I need to annotate, I create an OLDaily post (or some other digital note) and include a link.
@Downes what’s your practice / are your steps for inspection? Assessing the structure, etc. The physical book is sort of a map I can hover above, dive in here and there. I find for e-books I often lack that mental overview, and then end up reading linearly without a sense of where I am in a text or how much more there still is. (Although I too mostly read e-books)
I often buy both paper and ebook. I most often read and mark-up physical books. But, if it is a book I liked and have marked-up I will also pick-up the ebook version when it goes on deep sale (under $3) and capture the highlights and annotations there. It is easier to get what I am interested in out of the book. Sadly, the ebook often misses the context of where in the book the highlights and annotations are from, other than fuzzy positioning.
I was leaning on ebooks heavily about 10 to 15 years ago, but moved back to paper as I found them far easier to gut (using index and table of contents to find relevant sections), but pure searching is only viable in ebooks. I will often have two to four books open at the same time digging into something and comparing and contrasting, which isn’t possible in ebooks as easily.
My issue now is the process and workflow to get snippets out and into the main flow in my notes as most of the extraction services to pull from ebooks place them outside my notes directories.
@ton I meant to reply to this but erroneously created a standalone post… https://mastodon.nl/@dirkmjk/112785818678594046
dirkmjk (@dirkmjk@mastodon.nl)
I’ve encountered publishers that provide a free e-book version when you purchase a printed book, by having you send a photo of your purchase receipt to them, or through some sort of code in the book. It’s an enlightened idea.
I use Readwise to store my highlights and annotations, and it supports an easy method for taking a photo of a passage, which converts to text using OCR. This is enough of a bridge of the gap for me.
I do the same thing as Peter Rukavina, using Readwise to collect highlights and annotations from both physical books and e-books. Physical books can be hard work where I find myself wanting to make lots of highlights. If I have read the eBook and get a lot out of it, I’ll sometimes buy another copy to pass on as a Bookcrossing book.