Thread: Reasons for reading electronic books
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Old 10-01-2011, 05:42 AM   #30
SmokeAndMirrors
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Join Date: Aug 2011
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xg4bx View Post
it seems like i both read more and read more quickly since i got my kindle. i still love hardcopies but sometimes they seem like a chore to read. now i absolutely devour books and all i want to do is read.
This.

My reading rate has been gradually declining over my lifetime, beginning at "insanely voracious" and ending at "do articles count?" during the last couple years. I will say that most of that dive took place over the last couple years when I started traveling.

I'm one of those people who hates to get rid of my books. I want to keep them until they fall apart... and maybe longer. But I lived in a suitcase the size of my torso. It's hard to justify room for books.

So what I wound up with was 3 or 4 books I'd read a million times, and eventually novels became a rarity and I just resorted to articles and short stories online, but the screen issue was always a limitation. After about an hour, sometimes less, my eyes would suddenly feel like someone just took a picture with the flash on directly in my face.

This seems so odd to say, but since getting an ereader it seems to be true - yes, paper books were annoying for me to read. It's the wrong "form factor" for me (man, that sounds so bizarre!!). I love the way they smell, the feel of them, etc. But as I got older and busier, I hated that the pages always seemed to be unruly, they're hard to hold one-handed if you're a wee gal as I am, and they take up so much space - space I just don't have.

I'm back to my "insanely voracious" reading levels, circa 5th grade, since getting an ereader. At first I was a little worried about it just being a "geek toy honeymoon," but if anything my reading rate seems to be going up, not coming down.

There's a part of me that will always love the printed word, even if we could never seem to agree with each other completely. I stood and watched the paper I work for be run off the press just a couple weeks ago. It was absolutely awe-inspiring. And I thought to myself, this may not exist by the time I'm 40. Pay attention now - because you may never get to see this again. The sadness I felt as I thought that was overwhelming.

I'm a writer. I'm always going to love everything about the history of my language and my art. But at the same time, I'm also going to love everything that improves upon it and makes it more accessible.

Ereaders have removed a roadblock between me and reading the way I want to read. Reading has suddenly become more compatible with the rest of my life, with my physicality, and with my habits. It feels like a sort of betrayal to even say such a thing, but it is better than dead-tree books to me.
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