Let's Discuss: My Kindle & Me

 

I can't remember if I ever talked about this topic before, but decided why not revisit it if I did! I'm finding myself more and more unwilling to read books on my kindle and for whatever reason it bothers me.

My Kindle & Me: A Love/Hate Relationship

 

Yes, I think I have a love/hate relationship with my kindle. I do love that it easily allows me to read books from indie authors in a more affordable manner. But I absolutely hate having to read it on! Its not necessarily the size of the screen, although it does play a factor in it. What I hate is that I never know what an actual page looks like. Like how many kindle screens (based on my font and size) makes up 1 page in the actual book? It drives me nuts not knowing!

Usually when I hold a real book I will sometimes just flip through a few pages quickly to see how long a chapter is and see (depending on the time of night) if I am able to stay up long enough to read it before I crash. Sometimes that answer is no friends! Lol. I know the kindle does time you (sometimes, sometimes I notice that timer is not there! Although that might be on the digital ARCs I receive) on how many minutes are left in the chapter. But I have timed myself and they are wrong. So very, very wrong! Like their five minutes goes on for ten! It's nuts! And this is with me consistently reading and not being distracted.

Then it's legit just not knowing the page number, we have a location. Which again, I get is because of the kindle formatting and blah blah blah. A true page would take some finagling because of all the different kindle sizes, then there's using the app on any number of screens. It's hard. I get it. But I'm an OCD kind of reader. I like knowing my page count. I like knowing how many pages I've read and how many pages are left in a chapter.

I find myself actually looking at the digital ARCs and asking, how badly do you want to read this book? Enough to read it early and possibly ruin my enjoyment of it if it's formatted weird on my kindle? Because yes, sometimes I find I might not enjoy the book quite as much as I anticipated because I am reading it on my kindle! 

Then there are things I might be missing out on. On rare occasions books might put a glossary in the back and if the kindle version doesn't include a table of contents, because some don't, I won't know this is back there until the very end. Then I'll get ticked thinking, knowing what a gargantutode (totally made up word I typed just now!) way back in chapter 5 would've been helpful then and not after THE END!

So you see, it's a love/hate relationship to the extreme. Granted, I do love that I can easily afford indie authors' books on my kindle and that I can get better chances of reading an ARC if I agree to a kindle version. But man, sometimes I really have to force myself to finish a book that if written in such a way that reading it on my kindle makes it almost unbearable. Even if it's a book I expected to love from an author I adore! Hence, my indecisiveness over a few current digital ARCs that were offered to me lately.

Plus I feel like I totally read faster with a real book in general too. The aforementioned page discrepancy somehow does effect my reading speed as my brain is trained to pace myself based on the page in front of me, so a small page of words doesn't get read as fast as you would think.

So that's me and my weirdness. What about you? I know lots of people love the ebook reading more than the real book reading. So where do you fit in? Are you one or the other or a hybrid lover?