A few weeks ago, a little birdie told me to watch my mail for a Christmas gift. Late that week, a smallish box emblazoned with the logo of a ginormous internet retailer appeared at my door. I immediately called my mom to ask if I could open the box right then. She said no, not wanting me to wreck Christmas. Luckily my grandmother, the giver of the gift gave her permission to open the box.Grammy was always our sugar dealer as kids, doling out extra dollops of whipped cream over our parents objections. Giving us another cookie even though we'd already had three. I equate her allowing me to open this present early to those acts of generous spoiling. She is still my sugar dealer, only instead of food she gave me amazing technology.
I have been very resistant to the whole e-reader thing. I LOVE books. My favorite smells in the world are "new book" and "very old book." One speaks of a promise of adventure, the other holds the history of each reader to hold the book. I was sure I would go into withdrawl, pine for my old friends paperbacks if ever I made the leap to e-reader-land. While I will always love the heft of paper and cloth, I cannot imagine my reading life without my e-reader. I downloaded a book from ny library the first night I had it and haven't looked back.
Here is a rundown of some of my favorite things.
1) The ability to increase text size as needed. This feature means that anything I want to read I can read. With regular books, the size of the text in a book determined whether I could be interested in it or not. Now if a book I want to read has small print in it's orignal form, I can easily increase the text size with a few taps to the touch-screen device.
2) It is lighter than a paperback. Muscle fatigue is sometimes a factor in what I can or cannot read. Large books can mean I can't take them to bed with me because there would be nothing to rest the bulk bof the book on. This problem is totally resolved with my e-reader. The other day, I was reading a 600-page book, and I couldn't believe that I was holding it with one hand. Awesome.
3) The built in dictionary. It just makes me feel smarter. My gastroparesis is throwing me all kinds of new terminology, and with a few taps I can learn the meaning of any word that has me stumped.
4) The capacticy. 3,000 books would be hard for me to reach. The idea that I can be carrying around that many books makes me drool. I can also read a lot faster on it than with a regular book. In the three weeks I've had the device, I've read six books. Two books per weeks, pretty amazing.
I am officially an e-reader convert.
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