Hello my Freaky Darlings,
I’m officially addicted to ebooks!
Here are a few of the reasons why I love them:
I never have to leave the comfort of my own home.
The download is quick and easy. Within a matter of seconds I have the book my heart desires.
I don’t have to spend extra cash on petrol to get to a shopping centre or deal with hordes of other shoppers.
There’s very little chance of the book not being in stock and there’s no judgemental, snotty book store clerks looking at me funny because I bought something that’s not exactly mainstream or literary.
There’s no storage space issue, no worrying about if I have space in the bookcase or if I have to buy another one. All ebooks are stored nice and safely on my laptop or ebook reader (I have a bebook).
And lets not even go into the nightmare that is moving home and carting all my books to the new place. No such issue with ebooks.
Then there’s the ecological issue. No trees are cut down to feed my addiction, so I can sleep peacefully at night.
Ebooks are incredibly convenient!
I know there are some who want to cling to tree books and say that there’s nothing quite like the smell of a book etc, but you may as well be sniffing dust, it’s the same smell people. Remember when some said that LP’s sounded better than CD’s? We all know how that turned out, don’t we? And now we have the iPod.
Ebooks are the future and the future is here.
Let me know what you think about ebooks?
Hi, Joan. I totally agree with you. My wife is a teacher and only really gets time to read during the summer when school is out. Usually she read about 5 books. The first year after I bought her the Kindle, she read 8. You just can’t beat the convenience!! I listen to rock and classic rock music. A year or so ago when Sammy Hagar’s Autobiography came out, I had totally forgotten about it. Twenty seconds after I remembered, I owned it, downloaded it and had begun to devourer the thing.
-Jimmy
I do love ebooks very much, yes. I love not paying shipping and handling on a book if I don’t have to, and I love knowing that I didn’t spend money on jet fuel clogging up the environment. I love the instant accessibility, being able to pick up a new book and read it right now instead of waiting two months for international shipping to finally get the package to me over here in Italy. I love the lightness of my ereader, and because I like to read books one chapter at a time and then switch titles like other people switch TV channels between episodes of their favorite shows, I love being able to close one story with an electronic bookmark saving my place and open another book right to where I left off in seconds. I love all of these things so much that I was an early adopter in a time when many people were still suspicious of e-ink readers.
But having said that, I have almost equal sized piles of ebooks and print books because sometimes, the batteries die on my ereader and I still want to read something. Also, living outside the US, I’ve VERY OFTEN run across books from seemingly xenophobic US publishers who will not sell their ebooks to me because I live in Italy. Nothing is quite so frustrating as reading an awesome review on someone’s blog, finding a link to Amazon, and then finding in place of the buy button “Not available in your country.”
And, I don’t get this constant need to avoid other people in modern society. I have MS and am a shut-in for as many as 2-3 weeks at a time because my health makes walking trips a bit of a strain. But when I get out, man, I love to people watch. I think Milan is full of amazing people. I love people, I guess, and I don’t understand why so many folks who are able-bodied long to be shut-ins. I know I hate it, and I know I’d get out more if my body could handle it.
When I go out, I love walking from one bookstore to the next (We have three in a six-block area around Duomo that all have books in English, and they rarely have the same stock from the other stores.) I love the thrill of browsing a bunch of titles that do nothing for me, only to run across that one book that sounds really, really good. I love eavesdropping on people while they explain why they think this book or that is worth a read, and although I don’t quite get off on sniffing books the way some people do, I do still like the smell of a bookstore.
Sorry for the ramble. I do love ebooks, but I don’t think I’d give up on the outside world just because of the convenience factor of shopping at home in my undies. (Even if I do think that’s pretty awesome, shopping in my undies.)