MSU Red Cedar Message Board

It was in a horrible location. I lived in Hubbard freshman year and walked in The College Store one time all year.

That was actually the only time I ever walked into the place.

I know it's not in EL, but there are still Bagel Fragel's around. There is one on the northside of Ann Arbor that I make sure to hit every time I go home. Nothing better than a fragel in the morning.

I even got my wife to love Fragels and she was from Illinois. We would stop by every time we were visiting EL. We would by a bag full to have for the week after we got home. It was also the place I would grab a fragel and coffee before class and even would pick one up for some profs. Boy, what I wouldn't give for a fragel this morning.

By the way, the idea of electronic books replacing the real thing might be a mistake because my 14-year-old has a kindle and a notebook for school and hates them. He says they're hard to read and not as good as smelling a new book.

I don't really care about the smell of a new book. I think if the E Readers could become superior in all other factions, I can deal with losing the smell.

My problem with E Readers are two things. One is simply writing in margins. I write in almost every book I read. It's a habit left over from college and helps me remember what is going on and important parts. E books, while they are trying, do not make it easy for me to write in a margin and easily see the note when I reference back.

The second is that I can't flip back and forth very easily. If I forget something that is a few chapters back, but I am unsure where, I have to keep pushing next page or try to do a search which may or may not find exactly what I am looking for. I can't flip back and forth easily between two pages. I was an Econ major in college and I can remember holding books open to two or three different pages for equations and to understand how they were built. You can't do that easily in an E Reader in a short manner of time.

Yep these are 110% my thoughts as well. I take notes and highlight all over everything...even when I read stuff for work (sometimes pisses my colleagues off becuase I can be really harsh without really thinking about it) and even when I read fiction. I try with my kindle and even my ipad but having to stop and type something out is no where near as easy as a quick star or something in the margin.

I also hate not being able to easily flip back and forth chunks of pages and would do that exact holding technique or use sticky notes (yeah they have book mark feature) in places I thought I might wanna come back to and could write what I was looking for on the sticky. Sometimes by the end of a book I'd have stick notes everywhere. The book marking feature just isn't the same.

Also charts and graphs kinda suck on my kindle. I like to really understand charts and flip around comparing and stuff and I just couldn't do that (I tried reading The Price of Civilization by Jeff Sachs but as an economist the bastard used so many graphs I ended up buying the hard copy so I could actually look at what was going on).

I'm getting more comfortable with the e-reader but I have to read books that are pretty benign or that I don't really feel the desire to engage with as much. In fact the way I've used it thus far is downloading the samples of books I end up going out and buying hard copy.

I think my favorite thing about hard copy vs. ereader or my way of summing it up is that with a hard copy book its easier to get the big picture and make connections between different parts of the book, whereas ereaders are frustratingly linear, which works for some books if you just want to get from beginning to middle to end. But I don't think that kind of reading is most conducive for learning, especially at the college level where you should be doing more than just rote memorization and being spoon fed. A big picture approach is crucial for developing legitimate critical thinking skills and creativity.