I recently purchased a Kindle Paperwhite, and I can confidently say that the ebook has restored a great long lost love I once had for reading books.
A common complaint I have heard in regards to ebooks is, “I’ll lose focus too quickly.” Which leads me to my first point, don’t get a tablet. You aren’t buying a “$200 Facebook machine” as one of my friends so cleverly put it. You’re buying a reader. If you want to spend all afternoon playing Temple Run, updating Facebook, checking Twitter and Snap-Chatting then go ahead and buy an iPad or a Kindle Fire (The tablet version of the Kindle). If your plan is to read, then do yourself a favor and don’t buy a larger version of your smart-phone.
Now that we have established you aren’t carrying around an iPad, what exactly will you lose focus doing? Reading? Why?
Have you ever enjoyed a book so much you carried it around everywhere, trying to sneak in pages during any window of free time you may have found throughout the day? Well, with an ebook, the reading window becomes even more accessible. An ebook allows you to change the size of the font you read (which is awesome within itself). The nice side effect that comes with the size of the font, is how much font you see on a page before you have to tap the screen (so much easier than licking your finger and turning a page by the way) to move on to the next page.
Reading a whole fat book won’t seem as overwhelming now that you aren’t staring at the stacks of pages ahead of you in your peripheral.
So maybe I see three to five paragraphs on a page. Suddenly, I’m able to chip away at my book even if I only find myself with 30 seconds of spare time. I don’t have to wedge a bookmark in horizontally at the halfway point of the page because I already finished the page.
Let the record show, if it is a good chapter or a really good book I would never spoil part of it by only committing 30 second spurts of reading. But some books I would gladly read for 30 seconds and pause.
The kindle is less bulky than a book, as essentially you’re only really carrying around one page. You can adjust the font size, brightness, color and font style as well.
One of my biggest fears before moving over to the kindle was that I would lose the feel of the book, and I have to say I surprised myself a little.
As much as I respect and love books, I respect and love good stories more; and when I am deep into a good story, I could be reading it off of a garbage can for all I care and it wouldn’t matter to me.
What I miss the most about books is the smell. Nothing beats the smell of opening up a brand new book and fanning those pages once through with your thumb. But, that is simply not reason enough to keep me reading the dead trees. Maybe someone will create an air freshener with that fresh book smell and I can hang it from my Kindle.
Another benefit to using ebooks is that they are cheaper. Sure, you shell out a little bit for the reader, but you save yourself from buying four or five hardcover books.
In addition to reading, I love to listen to music. Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with this. Many a nights I have found myself scrolling through my iTunes or Spotify libraries wondering, “What should I listen to tonight? I want to hear something new.” So, I find some bands I like, click on the “Listeners who liked this band also liked,” and I explore.
Now, when I’m lying in bed at night, unsure of what to read, I can do just that on my Kindle. Genre search on Amazon, stumble across some good reviews, click buy and presto. One fresh, unread, non-doggy-eared page corners, easy to read, lightweight, affordable unlimited library of books coming up.
