E Reader – Book Journey

First up. This post is Meg’s fault. 🙂 Write Meg wrote earlier this week about her Kindle Vs. the paperbacks. It is a good post. Read it.

I know the discussion is not a new one, in fact I am pretty sure somewhere in my archives among the cobwebs deep within this blog shoved in a corner box marked Old Posts, I have talked about this as well…. however… I think my opinion has slightly changed.

In response to Meg’s post I wrote:

I am with you. I “kindled up” a couple years ago myself and I go in spurts of using it and then not… now it sits on my end table in the living so it at least has been upgraded out of a corner in the book room wondering where its charger is. 🙂 Like you, I enjoy the look and feel of a real book. Like you, I also find myself appreciating the Kindle more than I used to…. I can accept a Netgalley read right away as opposed to waiting for it to be sent to me. It obviously takes up less space…
One fun fact I learned from our library board is that e book check outs have plateaued. Interesting. I wonder what that means?

SO what has changed for me… and for possibly you… and maybe the world as opinions on e readers?

For me…

E Reader +

Honestly…. the e reader, a Kindle in my instance, is convenient. It is small, I can slip it in my purse and take it with me. For traveling it is wonderful… I can take with me a mystery, a non fiction, a literary, classic, best seller, and a Chunkster *cough cough Harry Potter*, all in the space of smaller than a paperback.

I like highlighting passages I plan to go back to for quoting purposes to friends, or at book club. I like to put my finger on a word and have a dictionary pop up and tell me what it means.

E Reader –

Sometimes my e reader does not hold my page. I may go out of that book to start another one on the e reader and when I come back, it has started over. Flip flip flip through the screen trying to find where I was…. annoying.

Charge it! Not always convenient. Granted the battery lasts for quite a while, but thinking ahead to having a full battery before I take off is not always on the agenda. Nothing worse than you are in a good part of a book and suddenly you can not read it.

Books +

Lets be honest…. I LOVE books. I love the look, the smell, the weight. I love the covers. I love it when the covers have a texture to them, I love the pages when they are beveled, or off white, or white, or have words on them.

I love the look of books in a home… they tell me something about the person.

I love being able to see what people are reading when I pass them in waiting rooms, on a plane, in a library, anywhere…

Books are conversation starters.

I love book rooms and book shelves. I love books in piles… on tables, end tables, coffee tables, counter tops, in rooms… on beds…. wherever.

A book does not need to be plugged in. In a power outage, I can still read by candle light. In a dystopian world of no electricity, my book still works… and if the new world is bad enough, it is also a weapon. 😉

Book –

It is hard to travel with books. If you are like me, you never know what you are going to want to read. That means when I traveled, I would take about 4 or 5 books of different genres. Notoriously, I would purchase book(s!) wherever I traveled to and add them to the 4 or 5. Basically – I take a carry on a plane for my books. It is a bit ridiculous. (I have since went to using my Kindle for travel and perhaps one real paper book).

They do take up A LOT of space. I have a room in my house for my books. I LOVE that room. I love the look and feel of it but quite honestly… it is a lot of books. It is like a page out of hoarders, except in my defense they are in alphabetical order by author and I think my case will stand up in court. 😀

I think what I am getting at here is there is a place in my world for both the paper book and the e reader. They can work together harmoniously.