Tuesday 20 September 2011

Books Vs E-Readers.

Yesterday I came across this rather interesting article, posted on Twitter. Reading it, I realised there were so many more reasons for and against E-Readers than I had ever considered. The author raises some valid points, that they are very useful for people who cannot physically hold up a book long enough to read it without being in considerable pain, which I had never even thought about before. On the flip side though, I think it would be a pretty disastrous  thing if they suddenly stopped publishing books properly (as I see it), and only "published" them in an E-Book format. Not only would they limit the number of people who could access and read their books, as the article points out, but I personally think it would take all the enjoyment out of reading. Holding a piece of electronic wonder in your hand would never be the same as holding a never-before-opened paperback, knowing that as you turned the cover you were the first person ever to be doing so. Books have a certain smell, a certain feel. Shelves full of books look so appealing, you want to run your finger over the spine, you want to pull them out and examine them, and curl up in front of a fire reading one. I love to get lost in books-when a book is so good that you have to read it without stopping, and whenever you have to put it down, all you want to do is start again. With an E-Reader you can't flick through the pages to see how long before the next chapter, when you really should go to bed. You can't easily flick back to a page where something was previously mentioned to make sure you get it. To me, it seems like you are one step removed from the book-reading process-almost like someone else is holding a book in front of you and turning the pages for you. It just seems so strange, such an alien concept to not have the physical thing, and I am sure it's much more easy to get lost in your imagination from a book than from a computerised version. My house is FULL of books. If anything we have too many, they are everywhere and so few of them get read nowadays. But I would never swap the mess and the clutter, and the simple lack of being able to find that one book that you really want to read for a tiny computer that held the same books. It just wouldn't be right, it wouldn't be home.
So no, an E-Reader most definitely isn't for me.
How about you?

Jenni

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