This blog post is inspired by this poll on Mastodon.
I bought a Kindle when I was able to buy one in my country. I loved it. I had a whole library in my bag! I still read books on paper, at home, but when I went out, I always had my Kindle.
I used to tell myself that one time I went on vacation and brought 11 books, and now I could carry 100 at the weight of one of those.
The Kindle broke, and I upgraded, mostly through eBay because a. cheap and b. didn't want to give Amazon more of my money than necessary.
And then something changed, somewhere during the pandemic. I realised that I had way more books on the go than usual, and flitted between them, not really finishing anything. I also noticed that I didn't go for the books I wanted to read, I read the easiest ones, usually Regency romance or suchlike.
Nothing wrong with romance, it's still one of my most-read genres, but I love fantasy too. And almost none of the books I read in the first half of 2022 were fantasy.
So in December 2022, I challenged myself to read only books on paper, and after just one day I was smitten. I loved the soft amber light of my reading light, the way paper whispers when you turn the page, everything.
the child in me
Reading paper books linked me back to the child I was, always curled up with a book, always so happy to read.
I believe I read ten books that month. And some of them were 500+ pages.
I noticed something else too. If I wanted to flit from book to book, I had a lot to carry around with me, so instead of having ten books on the go, I mostly had three, two fiction, and one non-fiction.
I realised that the Kindle fed my ADD tendencies, and having only a couple of books at my bedside forced me to focus on my current reads.
Another advantage was that I started to sleep better. Even if the ads say that the e-ink is much better for your eyes, the Kindle still disrupted my sleep.
My Kindle sits on a shelf in my library now, I grab it sometimes when I want to read one of the books I bought for it, for instance, but never at night, and I never allow myself to download anything else.
It's perfect, for me.
