The reading experience

If there is one thing all readers are after, it has to be the perfect reading experience. Of course, reading is always fun, but sometimes it’s just something else entirely. A whole range of factors will suddenly fall into place and you just know that you’re having your perfect reading experience. In the same way that some cups of tea are better than others for no discernible yet still-very-there reason, some reading sessions are also superior to others.

But what makes the perfect reading experience? It can be tempting to romanticise about it a little bit, and suggest that if you want to have a truly wonderful reading experience, you should read a printed book rather than an e-book. There can be at tendency to think that it can be harder to lose yourself in an e-book than it is in a hardback or paperback, simply because of the medium.

Maybe this is true for some people, but I think other factors are far more important than what format you choose to read in. Above all, it’s all about the book. All of those external factors – where you’re sitting, how comfortable you are, how much time you have to read, the time of day – matter, but even if you have the perfect environment, without a cracking book your reading experience will always be lacking something.

And when it comes to a cracking book, it doesn’t really matter how you read it, or when or where. If a book is truly good, it should capture our attention regardless and make us want to read on no matter what else is happening around us. Simply reading creates the ideal reading experience – something that should certainly encourage all of us writers to keep on improving, no matter how long we’ve been in the business.