There obviously is a heated debate amongst readers regarding the reading experience one has on a electronic reader versus a physical book. I for one had long ago adopted the Amazon Kindle as my go to reading device. Prior to that, I bought books used, through goodwill or borrowed them from people who had finished reading their copy, or, gasp!, sometimes I would go to the library to borrow one from there. Then I got tired of of going through that hassle so I would just sit at a book store, usually Borders (sadness), reading the entire Harry Potter or even the behemoth of a series The Game of Thrones by R.R. Martin. Why buy a book I couldn’t afford and would only read once, was my reasoning?

But the book experience was different when I was reading from a physical book. Still, as I go through five thousand plus pages of reading this past year, my experience with the physical books I read was far more memorable, though the books weren’t all that great in terms of content. I finally hit on why the book experience offers such drastic differences in relations to electronic versus phsyical. Here is a portion of an article in The Scientific American by Ferris Jabr called “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”:

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.

While there is this experiential difference, I still can’t get beyond the convenience of having an e-reader.

For starters, its been ages since I have read as many books in one year as I have since I got my Kindle device. I was a vociferous reader when I was younger, but then having lost my back pack, carrying around a physical book and having a busy hectic life style left me to reading very little. In fact, my ADHD causes me to not read one book at a time, but rather, I am usually reading five books at any given time. Which book I decide to read at a certain moment is really up to my mood and the stresses of life. This past year, I read through 900 pages of the history of intellectual property and over the course of two days read a free fiction book by Kristen Chen called “Soy Sauce for Beginners”.

Speaking of free, the other benefit with Kindle, or any e-reader, is that you can get books that are out of print for free, classics that I read over and over again. One of my favorite authors being Jane Austen, and one of my favorite reads being Pride and Prejudice.(If your enterprising enough, you can also get digital files for books just like you could possibly find illegal digital files for music and movies. I, however, don’t recommend that you do this because its illegal.)