Today I had planned to post about my new deliberate reading strategy, which is basically just a return of my TBR – review – library book rotation, but it already isn’t working out so well for me. I like piling the books up in the order that I should read them, but the minute I land on a dud or feel like I’m not really happy with what I’ve chosen, I start to question what I’m doing. For example, right now I’m trying to get through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, perfect timing since it just got longlisted for the Booker prize, but I’ll confess, I’m not crazy about it. I don’t really know why, but I just don’t think I’m a fan of David Mitchell’s prose and I’m not really seeing where the story is going – so I’m already impatient with it and worried that a few books are going to slow down my reading. My goal was to slow down my reading, but this isn’t working as well in practice as I had hoped. I’ll have to go back to the drawing board, I think.
Anyway, what I want to talk about now is ebooks. I’ve had a bit of a perfect storm this week leading up to the fact that I am considering getting an ebook reader. First off, the new Kindle 3 is actually in my price range. It’s also going to have a dedicated UK ebook store, the lack of which has put me off other devices in the past. Secondly, we are finally putting our anniversary trip to Paris (I can’t tell you how excited I am) in motion for October and I’m going to be on trains for about four hours each way, but don’t really want the weight of multiple books on my back while wandering around the city. And, to top it off, I ended up reading an ebook on my computer yesterday and today and I really dislike that experience. I also know that I could access at least some of the galleys on netgalley if I had a Kindle (unless a UK Kindle will struggle with this – a question I must ask!) and there are a number of exciting books there I’d love to read on release.
I don’t actually plan on buying too many ebooks full price for the device, but that option would be nice too. My husband is fully in support of the plan because he hates the huge number of unread books I have stacked around. I don’t want to give up paper books, though, and I always feel like I don’t really own the books I have in ebook format, especially knowing about DRM restrictions. Amazon isn’t very good about this, so even though we might end up with access to Kindle for Android on both of our mobiles in a year or two, I’m still hesitating. A couple of years ago I would never even have considered purchasing a Kindle, and I’m not even sure when I changed my mind about that!
So, what do you think? Is an ebook reader a good idea? Do you have one and enjoy using it? Help!
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