The Top Five Things I LOVE About eBooks
- EJ Fredrickson
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Number Five: Money, Money, Money!
Hey, call me mean, but, as a girl who likes to count the pennies ALMOST as much as Ebenezer Scrooge, the first thing I LOVE about eBooks has got to be the price!!!
Apparently, the average price of an Amazon Kindle eBook ranges from $3.99 to $12.99, while the paperback alternative comes in somewhere between $9.99 and $19.99.
This, admittedly, means that the prices of books on Amazon vary massively… but bargain hunters like me are quite willing to give up that nostalgic ‘book smell’ if we end up with a few more bucks in our pockets at the end of the day…
Coffee, anyone???
Number Four: Save the Tree!
I promise you, I’m not just thinking about myself and where my next espresso is coming from… Noooooooo, I’m thinking about the mighty oak!
Actually, in the Land of the Long White Cloud, it’s the (slightly less majestic) pine tree that lays down its life for the sake of the humble paperback! So let’s pause for a moment and appreciate this noble tree…
So, my all-knowing amigo (Google) tells me that one single pine tree can produce approximately 2,000 to 3,000 paperback books… Not bad, eh? But how many of our spiny, piney friends go into making an eBook? Of course, ZERO!
So I guess that means there’ll be plenty left for Christmas…
Number Three: Heaps of Holiday Reads!
I’m not alone in this, right? As much as I LOVE reading (and I REALLY do), the only time I get to actually sit down and devour book after book is when I am away from my desk, my washing machine, my dishes, my Hoovering…
That’s right! I’m talking about sun, sand, sangria, swimwear! I’m talking about HOLIDAYS! But aeroplanes don’t have room in their holds for ALL THOSE BOOKS I have been waiting to read… So what is the solution???
You’ve guessed it! eBooks!
By all accounts, a typical smartphone (and, I guess, mine’s pretty typical) can store thousands to TENS OF THOUSANDS of eBooks! So, even if I do NOTHING but read during my precious annual seven days in the sun, I’ll STILL never run out of those trashy novels I like to read when no one’s watching…
Number Two: Never Lose Your Place Again!
Seriously, as I think I have already mentioned, I LOVE reading! BUT (this is where I spill an EMBARRASSING secret) Even when I’m reaching the climax of the most GRIPPING thriller, I often find my head starts to nod, my eyelids start to close – and what happens then?
The gripping thriller SLIPS through my fingers, the pages fan out for the briefest of moments before resuming their most natural form – That of the CLOSED BOOK – and what happened to my precious, hand-crafted bookmark? Well, of course, it is cheekily resting beside my sleeping self, NOT marking the page that I will never even remember getting to anyway…
HOWEVER – and I guess, by now, you know where I’m going with this – when I’m enjoying the said thriller IN EBOOK FORM, does it matter if the Land of Nod beckons? No sirree!
Here’s the clever bit… An eBook automatically marks and remembers the last page you read, ensuring you return to EXACTLY the same spot… And, if that wasn’t enough, “Whispersync” technology is often used to sync this location across multiple devices…
GENIUS!!!
Number One: Super-Size It!
And YES! We’ve reached Number One in my countdown of the top five things I LOVE about eBooks! (Hoorah!)
This one gets my top spot because, for a girl who can only read in the daytime, or under some sort of high-octane, carefully angled reading light, the fact that eBooks have their own built-in illumination system works wonders for my less-than-perfect vision!
The special nighttime white-on-black no-glare option means that, if that juicy crime thriller is really starting to live up to its genre, I can read all night, and who would know?
And I ESPECIALLY love that thing where you can make the words bigger – SUPER-SIZED if you want to – so all that squinting at the page, and angling the book so the light hits it just so – these are things of the past. Yeeha! DIY large print puts an end to eyestrain!
Or, I suppose I could just get myself some reading glasses…
Comments