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Linda A | all galleries >> Galleries >> 2015: a life MORE ordinary > 17th July 2015 - going over to the dark side (wholesale)
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17-JUL-2015

17th July 2015 - going over to the dark side (wholesale)

I have always been a book worm and a total cynic about ebooks. I was so anti ebooks that I actually made covers for paperbacks saying on the front Kindle v -1 (now surely you won’t see a more geeky joke than that today). Then I got a voucher from Sainsburys offering me oodles of nectar points for buying an ebook. I bought it and was hooked.

The more I thought about it the more I loved the idea. You never lose your page because you drop your book and it accidentally closes. When you go on holiday you don’t have the worry about what if you run out of books and are forced into reading the crap that other people have left behind on the book cases because you can load your reading device up with forty books before leaving and even I can’t get through forty books in a week (even if it rains all week). If you finish a book at 3am and NEED something else to read RIGHT NOW you can just go to the bookstore and buy something that will be available almost instantly.

But it’s this that made me want to move over to ereading lock stock and barrel. Do you know the feeling when you’re browsing an author you like for a new book? I do it regularly and soon come to recognise all of the titles by that author whether or not I’ve read the book. In my previous life, when I read a paperback then gave it to the charity shop I would have needed a huge amount of self-discipline to make a list of what I’d read by any author. Now I don’t need to. I can simply flick back through my electronic library and find other books by the same author then make a decision based on what I’ve already got. It doesn’t matter that I’m “keeping” books I’ve already read because they no longer take up space I don’t have.

Now I’m sure that sooner or later my beloved Hudl will fill up and refuse to allow me to download any more books but I believe that day to be a long way off. I’m also pretty sure that if it dies, gets lost or stolen, I can just log onto my Kobo account from a new ereader and away I’ll go with all of my old stuff intact.

I also love Kobo. The design team who thought of the rewards system (see photo) had a genius moment because it makes me feel good to see that I’ve achieved a reading milestone and I also love to see how many hours I’ve spent in mind-enriching activity during the month. I only have two teeny little annoyances with the software – firstly that you can’t put your books in a shopping basket and pay for all of them in one go, you can only “buy now” which means that if you buy four books you have to check out four times and the other annoyance is that you can’t tell how far through the book you are – I’m sorry Kobo but the blue line device and progress through a chapter just don’t work for me – I need to know my page number and how many more there are to the end of the book.

Anyway, I have gone, in a very short time, from being devoted to books made from paper to ebooks – it’s exactly the same sort of progression as the one I went through when I became devoted to my bread machine.

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