Oh people who are all nobby about books

[LordPalmerston]

"Oh I love a real book". "I can see how much ice got left". Oh fgs ebooks are way better one handed reading. Easy storage. Easy to buy and HUGE FONT option for when you've forgotten your glasses or are drunk

Why do people go into mini orgasm about paper ?

I download samples of books, if I don't like them I don't buy them.

Although I did buy one the other night, then canceled it but it took them 24 hours to remove it from my kindle,By which time I had read it.

But those are pre-internet.

The whole point then was that it's tough to read books if you never have them in the home (library books or not).

But surely you could count the number of books on a kindle too. Though I know people who use kindles for themselves but still prefer board books for very little children as they are less fragile. That's understandable.

So your parents could have thousands of books on their kindle, but it would have no effect.

Parents reading and talking about children helps children, I don't think the format matters.

one of the consistently biggest/most accurate markers for educational success in a child, was purely the number of books in the parental home.

Because the kind of parent who regularly reads is likely to encourage their children to do the same. How they read is irrelevant.

There is nothing magic about paper and ink.

My daughter loves my cookbooks that have little notes and comments scrawled on the pages plus of course stuck on ingredients . This part of a books history cannot be replicated by a Kindle.

Well we didn't have many books at home as children. Money very tight etc

I borrowed them from the school library.

But how many books is enough to be a marker for educational success? 50? 100? 1000?

Doesn't it also depend on what sort of books they are?

Also, I wonder about the impact of books now we have the internet and you no longer need to have Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I don't need everyone to.know I read grammatical books.

usual - I googled and can't find it, but there was a woman in the early 80s who was fed up with the studies about book ownership (as biased towards those who can afford it, obviously), and she looked at frequency of visits to a library, and found it's at least as good.

More libraries open though, though.

Ignore that last post.

I meant to say I don't need everyone to know I own books.

(Not to be pedantic, but because I know you're not sensitive - decry is one word.)

With a kindle I suppose that there is no real visual demonstration of reading - i.e page turning, an interesting cover etc for children to see.

If kids had to read on a kindle, they would never start because it all looks so boring.

i do find the 'how many books the parent have the more intelligent the child' misleading

but then again i find intelligent is subjective isn't it

usual you're always putting yourself down but you are pretty intelligent in my eyes

very astute

i'm very intelligent now i have a DEGREE

I display books, I built a room just to display my books. I am a bit of a nob though .

We also had no books in our house growing up. Nobody read. I was teased at home for reading , and I would read anything.

Yy, we had a great local library.

I read every Agatha Christie book in that library.

Ew, displaying books is a bit... not sure, trying too hard, maybe??

I mean there are book trying to take over our study (which is where they are ment to live), but also in stacks next to the sofa/my bed/the comfy chair I am sitting now.

I also have the Kindle app on my phone and on the laptop. And have the Ancient Kindle .

We also have hundreds of kid's books - ones we bought/were given and loads that we inherited from older cousins.

So, our books are part of the general decor, but not 'displayed' if you get my drift.

I think those studies were mainly about school attainment and surely will apply to paper books and ebooks; content over medium .
It's not owning books that makes you clever, it's reading them. And reading them to your children. And teaching them by example that reading is fun.

Kindles are visual, how could they not be?

I agree about interesting covers.

They're not tactile in the same way as print books, but then, you could imagine in 100 years someone would be saying how integral the action of moving the cursor down the screen is to the experience of reading, and this clumsy action of turning a page is no subsititute.

It's just what we're used to.

south - am I sensing the degree is recent? Congratulations if so! And I agree, though I think usual isn't being falsely modest, just stressing that people can be a bit unthinking in how they characterise intelligence and using her background as an example that proves it doesn't work to stereotype.

You is very clever with your degree

Oh, and I don't think it's a quantitative thing.
Imagine: 100 books = IQ 100
150 books = IQ 150

i think it's ace to display books, when you visit someone's house the book case is great to look at

pacific, someone wankerish once told me that he imagined one's IQ dropped a few points every time one read chicklit.

By 'one' he quite obviously mean 'you, foolish woman'.