The problem in my current project is that the three volumes of Chirbes’s diaries are thick and heavy. I work in different places, such as:
– my office on campus
– my bedroom
– the library
– the other library
– a coffee shop
– and so on
I have to lug these volumes everywhere because I need all three at all times when I’m writing. I read gladly on Kindle, but for work, I need paper books. I can’t imagine having to find my way around the digital versions. Every scholar I’ve talked to agrees very enthusiastically that it’s impossible to work with digital copies. There is something in the structure of the human brain that requires a physical book you can touch and leaf through.
Clarissa's Blog 
Absolutely. And particularly with academic / secondary texts. The tech has improved many things as time goes on, such as quick access to endnotes/footnotes and almost-painless return from them; but still there is no way our senses can work intuitively with comparing a position number to the overall stated size; or really use a “percent completed” as well as just SEEING the stack of pages on either side of your finger.
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Can confirm. Kills me to try to line edit digitally, but one can one do? Perhaps it’s down to what you grew up with. We’ll know soon enough as the native digital readers move into the professions.
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I don’t even do serious academic stuff. But the ereader is mostly for novels and free public domain downloads.
For anything complex, you need paper. You can’t put sticky-note flags with commentary on an ebook. Or argue with the author in the margins. Or go back to some previous note without five steps of looking for it. I do appreciate, sometimes, the ability to keyword-search ebooks for all the *other* times the author mentioned… whatever that thing was.
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