Growing Into eBooks

 I never would have thought I’d make this move, but I think I may be switching from preferring paper books to preferring ebooks.

I always had a thing for books. I loved the covers, the pages, the shapes, the smells, the lore. I collected and hoarded and, yes, read. For years I did this. For decades. And then a strange thing happened. It happened aggravatingly slow so most of the time I was just confused. The books became burdensome.

I worried about having an author’s entire collection and if books in a series matched. I worried about how much space all the books were taking up. I bought or collected a lot of books I hadn’t read but wanted to. Or did I? I wondered if I would ever actually reread some of the books I was holding on to.

It took a while – years – to get over those hangups. And honestly I still get hung up on certain titles sometimes. But I’ve learned to let things slide by consciously convincing myself it wasn’t very helpful to be such a stickler for completionism or perfectionism. Sometimes it was impossible to get a series in a matching set. Sometimes I didn’t want to have or even read every single book an author put out. And I even learned how to let books go.

I always have let books go, I suppose. Otherwise I’d be quite buried in them. But for a long time I was “curating my own personal library”. Keeping only my favorites, the books I loved, the ones I wanted to share, that made me happy just to look at. But even then… it was just too hard to have the shelf space. I was constantly battling this favorite against that favorite – which one was more worthy of a spot on my limited shelves? I spent a lot of time thinking about books and it was exhausting. My reading life will never be finished, why did I think my shelves would be?

Anyway, the point I am very slowly getting to is that although I love paper books, I’m a bit over dealing with them. Robin Waldun makes some excellent points in his YouTube video Digital vs Physical Books, Which One’s Better? What stood out to me the most was that the physicality of a book today is just package. It’s the content of the books that I’m there for – the ideas, the story, the information. Sometimes I do get distracted by the pretty promising package of a book instead of its actual substance. And with ebooks, there’s not so much of that.

And as Leonie Christel on YouTube learned recently (each links to one of her two YouTube channels), ebooks are just so gosh darn convenient. I can borrow library books without leaving home and after library hours. I can buy and download a book instantly, no driving to a shop or awaiting delivery. Every book is so light, easy to hold, has the perfect font type, size, and margins. And if I don’t finish a library book before it’s due, the ereader remembers my exact place in the story the next time I borrow it. And I can read and collect as many titles as I can imagine without feeling the burden on my shelves. Now that I have a whole family of little readers, all these little conveniences add up to a lot.

I thought I was a ride-or-die paper books broad, but that has changed. While I used to eschew ebooks, I haven’t switched to eschewing paper books, so now I get to enjoy it all. It’s like there’s a format for every moment. Accepting ebooks into my life has increased my enjoyment of reading. Paper or pixels, looking or listening, there are more ways than ever to experience a story or absorb information and I’m glad for it.

I own a Kindle Paperwhite circa 2014 that my oldest son uses more than me now. Maybe it’s a bit slow, but for as old as it is, it’s still going strong. I only buy Kindle books that are unavailable anywhere else (gotta fight that Amazon somehow) and mostly borrow library books. The backlight is perfect for my kids to read at night while sharing a room.

Lately I’ve been reading from a Kobo Libra 2 circa 2023. I absolutely love the buttons and that I can access my library directly from the device. I haven’t bought a book from the Kobo store yet, but am eager to support an Amazon rival. It’s also easy to add my own PDFs by simply dragging and dropping files when plugged into a computer. It has a light so my middle child often uses it to read at night in bed, too. And it supports Kobo audiobooks!