title: About reading and books date: 2026-02-08 21:46:00 -0300 tags: books, e-books, reading slug: about-reading-and-books description: Books vs e-books image: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1457369804613-52c61a468e7d?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w3NTU3ODl8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwxfHxib29rfGVufDB8MHx8fDE3NzA1OTgwNzV8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080 image_caption: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Inspired by a post from R.L. Dane, Paper Books vs. e-books vs “librebooks?”, I decided to write something about my relationship with the act of reading.
I have been a reader from a very early age, thanks to my mother (RIP) who, despite having little formal education, was always an avid reader. Because of her, I was captivated by the pleasures of books. It was an easy transition, as I was a not-so-social kid who spent my school recesses in the library, reading anything I found interesting.
I always had physical books, but when my commute to work took more than an hour and carrying a heavy book was not an option anymore, I decided to buy an e-reader to help me pass the time. It was nice and I could read the entire A Song of Ice and Fire, The Last Kingdom, and the Expanse series with ease. Especially with the Expanse series, it was helpful to have an e-reader because only the first book was available in physical books at the time.
The problems
Despite the convenience, two major issues started to cloud my digital reading experience. The first is a technical hurdle: the PDF struggle. While e-readers handle EPUBs and proprietary formats with ease, they often stumble when it comes to PDFs. Since most academic papers and technical documents are formatted for fixed A4 or Letter pages, reading them on a small e-ink screen is a frustrating exercise of constant zooming and panning. When I found a new e-reader that was supposed to handle PDFs as “normal” text, I went for it, only to find that most of the PDFs are so poorly formatted that the text was a nightmare to read. The solution? I bought a tablet. It was the easy way to carry all those PDFs around and be able to read them. The e-readers? The first one, donated. The other, it's in one of my drawers :)
The second problem is more psychological: the “digital pile” syndrome. Physical books have a way of demanding our attention; they take up space on the shelf, acting as a visual reminder of what we intend to learn. Digital books, however, are invisible. Because they take up no physical space, it is dangerously easy to accumulate hundreds of titles during sales or through “librebook” bundles, only for them to sit forgotten in a folder. At of now, I really don't know how many digital books I own. Is the digital age at fault? Of course not, but it is still a burden to resolve.
And now? Now I keep all my papers in PDF (Zotero FTW) and, when possible, I buy physical books, even and especially the technical ones. I can read them in bed, I can look for a solution right away, I can reference them in my research and they are always there for me.