… And I Liked It!

I was telling you how I finally caved and bought an ereader? I’ve been using it for a week and a half now, and the verdict on using it is in: I freaking love the thing. Let me tell you about it…

So I bought the Kobo touch. I wanted to try it out before I committed to buying any books on it, so I initialized it with the Kobo store, which did all the work for me, and set itself up easily. With the little app it installed on my desktop, I was able to create an account with Kobo. Once my Kobo was charged up, I went into the library of free books available and downloaded a handful of free classics as test subjects. I started with Sherlock Holmes, figuring that if I only wanted to read a couple of the short stories once I figured this out, I could quit the book easily enough. Downloading the free books was fast and easy, though I did download one by accident, when I didn’t wait long enough for all the pictures to pop up and space the “download” buttons properly. Oops. It was easy enough to delete, though, since Dubliners is a goodly chunk of a book!

So I started reading. the touch on the Kobo is different than touch screens at work, where a pert little tap changed your screen right away. The touch you need is a little longer, the response time a touch slower. It’s a more leisurely pace, so it takes a moment to get used to it. Once you do, though, it’s nice, the navigation. I like that you can adjust font, line spacing, and margins,. so you can make your reading experience comfortable for you. I have mixed feelings about the ability to change fonts, though. On one hand, it’s nice to be able to choose a font that is always pleasing to your eye and easy to read. On the other hand, it renders book design a moot point, and makes every book potentially feel the same, which is a shame, because some books go out of their way to feel special, which I always like.

I do find the eInk and a little more white space (my chosen line spacing) to make for a very pleasant reading experience, though, and it is surprisingly page-like. I find backlit screens tough on the eyes, and hard to look at for a long time, so I am very happy to find this so similar to the reading of a regular book. It reads well in light, too, which is good, as I tend to read as I walk, and I don’t like dark rooms for reading or watching things, anyhow.

One of my favourite things, though, is the lightness and the ease of one-handed reading. I read on my commute, and books can be heavy or stiff sometimes. I’ve never complained, because dude, I’m reading, but by comparison, the ereader is a joy to use while hanging onto a pole. It’s also nice to not have to worry about bookmarks, something I never even realized were an annoyance until now. No one can lose my page for me!

I have since gone onto the Kobo store and bought one books for all of $4.09 – and am pleased at how much cheaper most ebooks are, though they can’t quite be lent to friends the same way, which gives me some pause in terms of buying and borrowing.

But speaking of borrowing, my next venture was onto my library’s site, where I downloaded a piece of software that would let me download borrowed books, something many library systems are doing now. I found a goodly handful of ebooks in the teen section alone that I wanted to read, and downloaded them. from there, it was a simple drag and drop to load them onto my reader, where they are mine for three weeks before they self-destruct. Bliss! Nothing to carry home and back to the library, no due dates to keep track of. The pile on my desk may actually get whittled down one day soon.

So yes, I am now so fully sold on this that when I took a much-anticipated paper-based book down off my shelf to read, I got some solid mocking from the man of my house about kicking it old skool. You know what? I can take it.