Reading: iDevice Vs. Physical

I'm currently reading Deception Point by Dan Brown on my iPad. The first time I ever read an ebook it was on my laptop. It was awkward and hot, even with a heat absorbing pad on my legs the MacBook's bottom got pretty warm. Turning pages by hitting an arrow key just felt strange, not to mention the weight resting on my legs. I liked a paperback better.

After I got an iPhone I began reading more ebooks. The screen size definitely took some getting use to. But after that adjustment period I began to see the appeal, especially since ebooks take up so little disk space. If the iPod was "a thousand songs in your pocket" (as the slogan went) then an iPhone or iPad is "tens of thousands of books in your pocket." Practically a library with you at all times. And it is for that very reason I read ebooks now and rarely buy physical books. With so many books to choose from and so many different ways to get them, I'm now reading books I probably wouldn't have if I had had to buy them in a bookstore. I simply put a big library on my iDevice and when I'm done with one book, I just scroll through the library and read something else that catches my eye.

The downside, for me at least, is that in exchange for having a massive library that I can get for free or very little money, not all ebooks are properly formatted. Formatting, for me, is important and poor formatting can take me out of a story quickly. If one of my ebooks is poorly formatted I will often look for another copy that's been done better. Thoughts that haven't been italicized, paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence, spaces between letters in a word all throw me for a loop and make have to reread the sentence. The two worst offenders, in my opinion, is either paragraphs that have not been indented or just run on or that there are two lines of space between every paragraph. Those drive me nuts. While I do that type of formatting on my blog, it is because each new paragraph is a new topic or thought. It shouldn't be like that in a novel.

I'm curious about the current pricing court battles and how they will affect ebooks in the future. In my opinion, ebook prices at the major retailers are way too expensive. Sometimes an ebook costs more than its paperback counterpart. Why should that be so? I know digital publishing is a new frontier and the companies are trying to adjust to it, but it seems pretty easy to think that lower prices would attract more customers.

Back on the brighter side, I prefer ebook reading. I love the ability to take out a book, any time and any where, and read it. If I hate what I'm reading, I can switch to something else immediately and not have to wait to get back home or go to the nearest bookstore to get something else. Syncing across different devices is great too, sometimes reading on an iPhone is more appropriate than reading on an iPad, like at the doctor's office or bus stop.

That's it for this post. Thanks for reading.

Update

I've picked up on my writing some and I'm writing the scene that is my midpoint, with a total of around 55,000 words up to this point. If I can keep this pace up I'll break 100,000. Which would be really nice. I just preordered the Kindle editions of Bennett's Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History and Jeffery Deaver's XO. Bennett's Only Superhuman comes out in October and they are taking preorders for the hardcover but not the Kindle edition yet. I prefer reading ebooks using Apple's iBook app but the iBookstore isn't available in Japan, so if I order an ebook on Amazon I have to use the Kindle app. That's it for this post.