E-Book Reading

I've been doing a lot of e-book reading lately in a number of different forms and shapes and thought I'd write down some thoughts about my experiences here.

One form of e-book reading that I find quite useful and fun is on my mobile phone while commuting and also in the evening before going to bed. In both situations the tablet is too large and heavy and while the display is much larger and thus perhaps better for reading I prefer the mobile phone in such situations. Especially for text books where formatting changes are not an issue it works perfectly for me. And by the way there are many ebook reader apps available free of charge as are the books via Project Gutenberg which has huge amounts of classic novels converted to ebooks available. A great service so I made a donation, Paypal makes that quick and painless.

On the commercial side I have given the Kindle app on an Android based phone and an Android based tablet a try.  Again, I like the experience and books bought in the Kindle app or on the PC via the Amazon website are transferred to the device in a number of seconds. In particular I read a technical book with this solution, sometimes on the mobile, sometimes on the tablet and the Kindle app makes it easy to keep my bookmarks and last read page synchronized across devices. Very good! The downside of reading a technical book in electronic version becomes apparent when there is a need to quickly jump between different parts of the book. In a real "paper" book that works much nicer and faster than on a tablet. An advantage of the electronic version on the other hand however, is that it is searchable when one doesn't know the exact place of that piece of information in the book.

So while I like the experience I'm not totally converted. The argument that wins me over for most of my reading, however, is that I can have books with me anytime anywhere without extra space required or extra weight to be carried, both of which are precious commodities during commuting and traveling.

 

One thought on “E-Book Reading”

  1. I agree with you about reading technical books, but I find the same problem with other factual books where I have a need to jump between sections quickly. For me eReaders work best for stories.

    As technology progresses I wonder what electronic format would be a suitable replacement for paper technical/non-fiction books. Would it be an eReader with multiple touch screen pages (remember it’s often nice to scribble quick notes on pages), or perhaps virtual pages injected and stored directly in our brains (reading books with our eyes closed!) Just like the paperless office, we’re not there yet.

    The ability to read synchronously across multiple platforms is useful and perfectly adapted to the different environments we read in. As is the ability to change font type, size, contrast, page width etc.

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