Paperbacks and e-books
A friend who has been reading From the Lives We Knew called this week. “The characters feel so real!” she exclaimed. “And I love the book itself, the feel of it, the soft matte texture of the cover, the size of the pages and fonts. I’m hard on books, but this one holds up.”
Which sort of reader are you — turn-the-paper-pages or swipe-across-the-screen? Oh, dear—audible, you say? Afraid I can’t do much for you, at least not yet!
As for me, I’m a paper book reader.
For one thing, I don’t have a pad-size device. I alternate between an iPhone and a Windows laptop. Once in a while, when a friend asks me for feedback on a draft, I’ll use one or the other of these rather than printing out the manuscript. However, I wouldn’t want to read the whole book that way.
One of the risks when reading with my iPhone is the temptation to multitask, to skip back and forth between email, Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet files. I’m much less likely to do that when I settle down with a paper book in my hands.
Moreover, I like the sensation of progress as I see the thickness of the pages in my left hand thin down while the pages in my right hand stack up. My favorite time to read is after I lie down in bed. I read until I feel sleepy, and then I slip the bookmark between the pages and set the book on the table before I turn off the lamp.
I took an elective course during Air War College. The topic was the proliferation or non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The instructors said to read everything online. The amount of material was massive, far too voluminous to print at home. Besides, I was expected to speed-read through it all sufficiently to pass an exam proving my familiarity with the readings. I didn’t even have a laptop back then, much less an iPhone. I sat upright at a desktop computer scrolling page after page after page for a few weeks. After that, the reading large amounts of material on a computer screen lost any appeal it might otherwise have had.
My wife, on the other hand, has an iPad, which she used to proofread From the Lives We Knew. I gave her periodic revised versions in PDF format, and she told me the page number of any part needing further attention. She’s a whiz at reading e-books although her favorite method of reading is with ear buds.
My blog uses an online medium, of course, and I appreciate certain advantages of digital print, such as saving paper.
From the Lives We Knew is now available as a Kindle e-book for cheap. You can preview it that way, if you wish, but I hope you’ll consider the paper version, too.
