My first Kindle was given to me by my sister. She was upgrading to a newer model and kindly offered me her old one, which my younger self could never refuse. I took one look at the little buttons on each side to turn the page and the keyboard at the bottom and was stunned. A device on which I could pretty much instantly get new things to read with no stock issues and no need to leave the house? Sign me up! And that started my love for the e-reader, forcing me to divide my attention between the wonderful feeling, smell, and experience of reading print books with the more convenient one of reading on the Kindle.
My second Kindle, which was a birthday gift after my family were sure I cared enough about the first one, further cemented my love of reading on a device, rather than using a book. Over the years of stuffing it into my bag to take on journeys and reading on it for hours, it became a little slower and I was ready for an upgrade, so I recently treated myself to a new one.
Enter the Kindle Paperwhite (11th generation). For some reason, I had not really considered how much could have improved in the six years I’d had my old Kindle, but I’ve been shocked (in a good way) at how improved the experience of reading on the Kindle Paperwhite is now.
The most striking difference to me was the screen. My old Kindle had a touchscreen with adjustable brightness, but my new Kindle has a slightly bigger, smoother screen that retains the wonderful paper-like look while having an infinitely better appearance. It’s smoother, clearer, and has better features for adjustment including a ‘dark mode’ in which you can invert the colours on the page to have white text on a black background.
It’s also much faster than my old Kindle, which would think really hard about opening a browser or a link, turning a page or going to the Kindle store. It would even struggle to register the fact that I had made progress in a book on another device despite being quick with this when I first started using the Kindle app on my phone for reading too, so it’s clear to me now that my upgrade was more than worth it.
With how quick and connected everything is, I’ve even considered making better use of my Goodreads account to track my reading, just because it’s so easy to do so with a Kindle.
Then, there are all the benefits of e-readers in general, which I’m feeling even more strongly with my new purchase. In true e-reader fashion, I got 600 pages into an 800-page book that I’d probably have been too intimidated to read a physical copy of without noticing how much I’d read. It’s slim and lightweight regardless of how many pages a book is, and it takes away the big book fear, allowing me to read anything without physical evidence of the length holding me back.
I’ve hardly had to charge it since I got it over a month ago, and I can set it to whatever brightness I desire with ease. While it doesn’t compare to reading a real book, it’s a convenient, useful alternative that offers its own unique approach to reading.
I know a lot of book lovers are against e-readers, but I’ve always loved them, and read both books and e-books quite evenly when you look at the tracker in my reader journal. They’re both excellent for different situations, and I love having the option to either cling to one book or have the option to carry around as many as I desire in one little device. To say I’m happy about my new Kindle is an understatement, and I hope it lasts for many years to come!
How do you feel about e-readers?
Read 'N Riot 