Last Days of the NOOK?

[Julie Paradise]

Originally Posted by gforgiraffe39935

This is a good point. However, due to my eyesight, there were paper books I just couldn't read at a certain point. If they didn't have large print or eBook available in the public library, I never read them. [...]

E-Books are great for their accessibility in various ways: 1) You can get pretty much anything instantly (funds and internet access provided), 2) you can then change fonts and sizes and 3) even have stuff read to you with text-to-speech, and 4) sometimes even translate parts or look up unfamiliar words with just a tap.

I think my comment went into the opposite of what you were going with (or understood it for, maybe, so I apologize if I was not making myself clear):

Books, as great as they are and although they have worked for centuries without much change and will in the future, are sometimes or under certain circumstances/for some people less accessible, yet some folks have to moan about all those great little e-reader devices we have now at our disposal, and moan so much so that it seems these are all bad, cheaply built, not thought out, garbage-crap-too-dark-unusable ...

When I am working on a publication (I am a professional [copy] editor, mainly in academia), I am always sad to learn that there is no e-book version planned, which is often the case, because this means that the physical book will be put on a shelf in an office, and that's it. I then always try to argue for a proper e-book (and not just the PDF), I mention accessibility (for disabled people), practicality, even offer to provide the EPUB myself, but still many people just don't want it or don't see the use of it, or they fear piracy. (Which is pretty naive, given how many books I used to paper-copy during my time in uni ... and the books we're talking about are dealing with Islamic law or Amharic grammar, so: Who will want to steal those, except maybe a few poor students who couldn't afford the 120 € print book anyway?) So, then I always make a private EPUB for myself and maybe the author, if they so wish, and happily use that.

[Quoth]

Commercial pirates can pirate paper nearly as easily as Kindle. They used to just upload image based PDF of the scans but now do OCR.