I don’t if the author is alive, not an asshole, and has not yet achieved generational wealth. like I’ll pirate Tolkein, Orson Scott Card, and GRRM, but not Larry Correia
I pirate most of the books I read. I am not a millionaire and space on the bookshelf is limited. I only buy physical if I want to treat myself with special edition or a book not available digitally.
I buy physical and obtain a digital copy later to chuck on the kindle. I enjoy reading physical books but time and life make it harder, plus I like to buy collectors editions where possible, they are not for reading (to me)
I purchase mostly digital books because I use to read at night next to my sleeping partner and e-reader is the easiest way for me. Also O don’t have a very big house to store all. Now from a piracy vs purchase point of view: I actually buy ebooks as a mark of support to authors I like very much. Now I must confess that for some very popular authors, I trend to think that one book pirated or one book bought won’t change a lot for them. So I buy mostly less known or indie authors at the end.
No. Usually I get digital books from the library system here. I enjoy reading print on the Kindle, very comfortable to the eyes, but if I tried to buy everything I wanna read I’d be in debtor’s prison.
Comics, graphic novels I buy in print because there isn’t a good digital way to read them. I do read some webcomics on a cheap color tablet, but I enjoy them more on paper.
If I want to own a book for some reason I get it on paper usually, but if I want to read it the library system works a large majority of the time.
I only read fiction, so I always buy it pirate ebooks unless there’s a special edition of something that I am really excited about. I’ve bought all of Brandon Sanderson’s mystery novels in hardcover for example, and I buy the Stormlight books hardcover as well. I’d love to have the entire cosmere in hardcover, or better yet their special edition leather bound hardcovers (for the ones he’s done it with), but it’s just too expansive and expensive to justify.
In an ideal world, a physical copy includes a digital copy.
Like fifteen years ago I would buy physical books, I still have a huge collection. I was getting really into math and would buy textbooks. Sometimes they could be pricey, but for a good hardcover, it can really be worth it if you’re coming back to it a lot.
Very early 2010s the amazon books became awful overnight. You could pay $70 for a hardcover and the damn thing would start falling apart a few days into reading it. I really don’t think I’m hard on my books, I treat them with care. These things just couldn’t handle normal wear for even a short amount of time. Paperbacks were even less reliable and only slightly less expensive. So I completely ditched amazon and started ordering books directly from the publishers. Normally they’d be like $10-15 more than on amazon, but it’s worth it, they weren’t falling apart.
Probably around 2012 I finished reading volume 2 of Francis Borceux’s “Handbook of Categorical Algebra”. Those first two volumes are genuinely some of the best math books I’ve ever gone through, it took me like a year each though. Volume 3 was very expensive to get from the publisher, I think it was over $160, but since I had gotten so much mileage out of the first two I decided I wanted to just pony up. It was clear as soon as it arrived that it was a piece of shit, and did start falling apart immediately. I left emails and phone calls and they just ghosted me and I couldn’t figure out a way to get my money back. That was the last book I bought for like a full decade, and I don’t think I’ve made a book purchase from anywhere over $15 since.
Pretty sure that was Cambridge University Press, and I had purchased something else (although much much cheaper) from them the year before that was good quality.
I still greatly prefer having a physical copy, but I pirate almost everything I can’t find in a library now.
Same here. Reference, particularly sheet music and cooking recipes work fine for me digitally.
I can sit at the computer and read social/news media for hours with no problem, but the way ebooks are displayed tires my eyes very quickly for some reason.
While I don’t have this issue with the e-ink/e-paper stuff, I’ve never owned one. I also appreciate that physical books are often much harder to damage and will work without electricity.
Digital. I’ve been reading ebooks for years, starting on my flip phone back in the day. The best part to me is being able to seamlessly switch from reading with my eyes to being read to (tts - I’m used to it now and it’s waaaay better than it was).
I do a lot of driving for work so I can get a ton of reading done on the road 😁
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