Right, jolly good, I've got the hang of this now and the e-reader is becoming part of the furniture.
Part of the furniture as in Ifind myself picking it up willingly and instinctively much as I would a 'real' book. I've had a wander around other opinions, Scott Pack is really putting the e-reader through its paces, John Sutherland seems generally optimistic, Mark Thwaite has his doubts and Sam Leith's been testing his in, well in a
cupboard. I don't do a lot of reading in a cupboard so I decided I could more usefully (for me) do a test-run in the Tesco's coffee shop (more of Sons and Lovers).Sometimes I can find my reading concentration in busy places like this shot to pieces by someone else's conversation about Auntie Vi going off her legs, (and then wishing I was in a cupboard) so this would be an ultimate test of immersibility in the text. No book in my hand, no pages to flick back and forth through my fingers, no cover to look at, no scribbling, just a screen, heavens would the e-reader hold my attention at all?
Strangely enough it did and somehow that has surprised me, the world could have been a million miles away as far as D.H.Lawrence and I were concerned. I never did get to hear whether Vi got back on her legs, in fact I was so comfortably immersed I almost forgot to go shopping. I can also report good results in the very comfortable Moorish Cafe in
Ashburton and to a backdrop of loudly conversational grown-ups who seemed to have forgotten they had toddlers with them.
I'm having no problem with reading the non-backlit anti-reflective screen either, even in the evening when my eyes can get scratchy and tired and I usually have a spotlight focused on my page, this feels like easy-on-the-eyes reading. In contrast I did all the last Long Barn Books short novel competition reading on my laptop and had to have eyedrops to hand to get through, this is nothing like.
In fact I'm not doing very well at being critical so far because I can't even go along with the moans and groans about the page-turning mechanism because I have hardly noticed that. It's a bit like a tumble-turn in a swimming pool (well I can't do one but am assuming), just don't wait until you've touched the wall before deciding to do that roly-poly thing.You know the end of the page is approaching so you time the flick (which turns the page momentarily into a negative image) as you scan the last few words, but just before you get there. Sorry told you this might be muddletechnology and the page turn is so momentary you can have no idea how long it took me to catch it on camera for you.It's gone in a nano-second.
I've had to slightly amend my reading process in that I can't marginalia-ise the text so a notebook is essential alongside for me, and my next upgrade on the
prototype e-reader jacket will have pockets and pen holder incorporated somehow somewhere.
Huw is calling it e-reader bling so I'm really up for that one, watch this space.
It was an odds-on certainty that I would warm favourably to the e reader because I do like a bit of technology. Of course it will never replace the books in my life, how could it? But it will replace the books I lug around with me constantly and wearily and there is something very nice about switching it on and hey presto, there's my reading.
And well I'll go to the foot of our stairs, The Tinker (father of dgr, 83) took one look at it and immediately ordered himself one. He couldn't think of anything better for reading in bed and when he's travelling. Books quite an encumbrance to hold as you sit up reading, especially as you get older (he'll kill me for saying that) and also when you want to travel light, plus if you don't want your little flat cluttering up to the rafters with books either, which the Tinker doesn't.
So we are now a two e-reader family, more soon including octogenarian observations no doubt.


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