My Reading Experience on Kindle
If there is a ‘thing’ that I ever genuinely wished to possess in the past 5 years, it is a Kindle e-Reading Device. But I kept postponing the purchase because I wasn’t sure if I would be a consistent reader and if I’ll use it to the fullest. Plus, I never really thought digital reading would be comfortable for me.
Then came the darling 2020 which saved a lot of my time by not having to do useless routine chores like dressing up and commuting to office. This year is when I am sincerely into reading habit. So I decided to go for the purchase, couple of months back.
2 months now into reading on Kindle and the experience has been far greater than I expected it to be. Here are few tit-bits about my digital reading experience.
Savior of my White Nights
There used to be times when usage of smartphone would snatch my night sleep. I would then get into a deadlock situation where I couldn’t sleep but I wouldn’t want to use my smartphone to kill time either. I would want to read but turning on lights would disturb other people in the house who are sleeping.
I’ve improved upon reducing the no. of sleepless nights I suffer, but it still happens once in a while. My Kindle accompanied me during few sleepless nights in the last 2 months, without disturbing other people in the house.
Dream came True
Tweeted this a while back as I felt that the progress distracts the flow of my reading:
Until I bought Kindle, I did not really know the device has an option also to not show the progress of our reading while I knew it would display % Completion, Page #, Time left, etc.
Free! Free!! Free!!!
I am writing this section because we are in digital age and I’ve seen people who are more comfortable doing something using their smartphones than by other means.
People tend to think reading is a costly habit while the reality is there are so many options in the internet to read books for free.
If you are someone who would not get distracted by notifications on Smartphone, all you need to do is to install Amazon Kindle app for Android or iOS on your smartphone.
- Most people have Amazon Prime subscription these days. The subscription you pay for is not only for binge-watching and binge-shopping but for binge-reading too. There are 100s of free titles (some really wonderful books) under ‘Prime Reading’ section of your Kindle Store which come for free reading along with your Amazon Prime subscription.
- Once you get into the habit of reading, you’ll realize your Kindle Unlimited subscription is as important as your Amazon Prime or Netflix subscription
- When there is a will, there should be a way.. You would automatically figure out how to download e-books for free legally if you are really into reading. However, check this out for different legal and free sources to e-read English books. These are my best sources to read free Tamil E-Books — FreeTamilEbooks, Azhisi E-Books and Project Madurai.
When I had the will, the way appeared to me
I work for Healthcare Industry. To gain basic understanding on the domain, I had signed up for AHM 250 Certification on Oct ’20. I had a 300 page PDF study material since long back. I wasn’t very comfortable reading PDFs in my laptop so I got it printed. But the font was toooooo small in the print and it disinterested me to open the printed book.
That’s around when I started using Kindle and I learned that .MOBI is the format in which Kindle e-Books are stored. Hunted for few sites that convert PDF to MOBI and ta-dannnn, I was able to Zoom In and Zoom Out as much as I wanted. Oops I sound too nerdy, don’t I?
All-in-All reading device
If you’re someone who can’t remember what you read or who can’t read attentively without taking notes…
If you’re someone who find it lazy to lookup meanings of unknown words while reading a book…
If you’re someone who feels like highlighting the text on books, but you can’t because you share your book with other people…
Then you should really consider buying a Kindle Device (Kindle App would also do… but hey! We are talking about the comfort)
You can highlight text, add notes to the highlighted text, lookup words on dictionary, translate words between languages (Kindle currently doesn’t translate to any other Indian language than Hindi 😕) and even do a google/wiki search. The highlight is you can import the notes you take to your email and save/organize it for your records 😍
Is reading habit helpful always? Well, I realized it is not so. Here are few adverse experiences of mine to share.
Please read on…
Perennial Pages
Since we get to zoom into a book by 4x or 5x than the actual size of the page, we tend to feel… okay, ‘I’ felt like there is no fast progress at all. I say this not by reading just one book on Kindle. I tried reading different books of different sizes and on different genres on Kindle. It felt like I wouldn’t be finishing the book until eternity.
There is junk in reading too!
Let’s get it straight. Reading is not always a habit to be glorified. It is just an essential habit. But at once you begin, there are high chances you get into reading spree just for the sake of reading more and more books. Do not!
Remember, it is not necessary to finish every book you start reading. It is not necessary to read more books. Targeting to read a no. of books just doesn’t make sense. All that matters is you must read things that are important for your betterment than to read just for filling up your goodreads profile.
Feel free to ditch a book if any of the parts doesn’t make sense to you or if it doesn’t interest you.
I follow some sensible people who recommend books but when I read some of those books I could not really connect with those books. I used to feel guilty that I couldn’t love reading that book as much as the person who suggested me the book loved reading it. Later, I understood it is completely normal to feel so. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it is not for you.
Nothing like a paperback book
I am indeed vouching for Kindle but can’t really conclude without making this classic statement — “nothing like a paperback book” 😝
People in the publishing industry are confident that printed books wouldn’t be replaced that easily.. At least for the next few decades until I will be alive… But I felt I should get comfortable with e-Reading too if that becomes demanding in future. That’s the very reason why I wanted to purchase Kindle e-Reader. But really, nothing like a paperback book! I don’t know if we are hardwired to love printed books. No - I never romanticized the smell of a book. And I can’t really say in what way paperback books treat me better than e-books. But it is true that e-Reading isn’t as good as reading a paperback book.
Yet, I would say purchasing Kindle is one of the best investments I ever did!
So, go for it if you have been contemplating this purchase! If you don’t like it, olx is always there to back you up 😉
