As I said yesterday, when I was looking over the books I read last year, I was surprised to see that I read 30 ebooks. Over half of the books I read in 2018 were in ebook form.
It got me thinking about why I like reading ebooks. They take up no room, they’re super easy to read when you’re lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and you never have to wait to buy or borrow an ebook.
But while ebooks are great, there are times when they are no so great. Here are some of my thoughts about why I don’t like ebooks:
Why ebooks are not great:
You can’t scroll or flip easily. You know how some books have a map or a family tree or some sort of illustration that is necessary to the book at the beginning? You know how sometimes you are in the middle of a book and you want to flip back to something you had read previously? Well, it’s difficult to flip back to the beginning of an ebook. It’s doable, but you have to remember where you were in the book and then scroll all the way back and then scroll all the way forward again. You can’t just put your finger on the page as a placeholder while you flip around.
You can’t lend them to people. Isn’t one of the best parts about reading a good book is the ability to lend it to your friends? I have yet to find a way to lend ebooks to people and if there is a way, someone out there please let me know. It is one of my main gripes about ebooks. I just think that if you purchased the book, you should be able to do what you choose with it, even if that is lending it to someone.
Typos. I’m not sure why, but I’ve found more typos in ebooks than in physical books. Sometimes the formatting is off or there will be weird spaces between words that I find really distracting, particularly when I am reading a well-known author. I’ve always wondered what the editing process for ebooks is and if different ebook platforms have to be edited differently. For instance, is the formatting the same on a kindle and a nook? What about ebooks that you can read on your computer?
It’s hard to see how many books you actually have. With my physical books, I can look at my bookcase and see if I have a particular book. It’s easy to see which books are on the shelf. But with my kindle, I have to scroll through a long list of all my books. With my physical books, I have them arranged alphabetically on my bookcase so I can go straight to an author to see which books I own from that author. But I have yet to figure out how to arrange my ebooks in alphabetical order – they are just in the order that I purchased them in. I just find it a bit of a hassle to look for my books on the kindle.
It’s not a physical book. Sometimes you just want to hold a book in your hands. Sometimes you want to feel the weight of a book and turn the pages. Ebooks are just not the same as a physical book.
So while ebooks have their pros and cons, I ‘m going to keep reading them. I’ll have to check in at the end of the year to see how many I read this year and see if I read more this year than last year.
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