WHY eREADERS ARE SUCH A GOOD IDEA

I have often been asked by friends and people who see me with my nose deep in my trusty Sony eReader, "Why do you have that gadget, what is wrong with normal paper books?"

Right there you have one of the benefits of owning one, people talk to you, they are curious about it and want to know all about the thing.  

There is nothing wrong with paper books - I recently moved, and was astounded, and rather embarrassed to find that I filled 83 boxes with books!  I like paper books enormously, the feel and  heft of them, the smell and the warmth of them, and the way that favourite books have become old friends over the years we have been together.  I get a pleasant feeling of being among friends as I gaze at their familiar battered old covers on the shelf.

So I don't think I can be accused of not liking traditional paper books, but I also love my eReader.

Second point, an eReader isn't a gadget (or at least not in the sense of a gadget such as a pocket DVD player).  An eBook is a perfectly sensible and useful addition to anyone's library for a whole host of good and sufficient reasons, some of which I shall now enumerate:

• Lightweight
• Convenience for travelers
• Ease of buying books for it without leaving home
  
• Capable of containing more than a few books
• Access to free books
• Encouraging experimentation in what one reads (especially with free books)
• Good for starting conversations with strangers
• Ease of reading
• Easy to organise one's books in it (well, with most eReaders this is the case)
• Never to be in that horrible situation of having come to the end of a book, and still having an hour to wait for the train and not having anything more to read.

And so it goes on and on.  Those are just the advantages that I could think of sitting here after spending the morning Scuba diving, thus not at my freshest!

A further point that has just struck me; I am addicted to sitting on cafe terraces with a book and a good cup of coffee, and with my eReader I don't have the irritating problem of a strong wind flipping the pages of my book. A small point, but an important one I feel.

For me personally, the main advantages of my eReader are the ease of always having a number of unread books with me when out and about and all fitting snugly into a large pocket on my trousers or in my small rucksack, and the second great point is that I am beginning to experiment much more with the books I read.

There are so many sources of free books online, ranging from sites such as Gutenberg to the huge number of self-publishing sites, so I am busy taking risks and downloading books by authors I have never heard of, never seen reviews of or in any other way have a clue as to whether they are readable or not.

There is no way I would do this if I had to go to a book shop and pay for these books, but simply surfing the web, stumbling across a book that looks like it might be interesting, downloading it and reading it at no cost is a risk I am happy to take.   As I have remarked elsewhere on this Blog, by doing this I have come across a number of very interesting and entertaining books, some of which I shall review here in due course.

To my pleasant surprise I am finding books written by Victorian  authors - not normally a period I feel comfortable with - whose books are vastly entertaining and readable.  An enrichment of my inner life that I truly feel happy about, and I have achieved this simply by owning an eReader.

So to sum it all up, an eReader isn't a replacement for a paper book, it is an addition, and that is what a lot of critics of eReaders are not seeing.

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As with most of my posts, I would be very happy if any of you felt moved to let me know what it is about eReaders that made you take the relatively expensive step of buying yourself one, so that I can post it here for the interest of others.