Catching Fire (and a confession)

If you caught my post of a few weeks ago you know that I am starting to read The Hunger Games trilogy with my son.  We read it almost every night, chapter by chapter, and it really got so exciting that I was losing sleep.  For my own sanity, I snuck off one morning (I can only read this in the morning.) and finished it.  Of course like any captivating story, I find that I can't stop thinking about it and this drove me to pick up the second book and begin to read it right away.

Now here comes the confession:  Rather than go to the bookstore or order it on-line, I picked up my husbands I-pad where he has already downloaded all three books and read, yes, I  did it, I read Catching Fire almost entirely as an e-book.

Whew!  That was a difficult confession.  When I was done, I felt slimy, like I needed to take a hot shower and get the shame of e-book reading off me.  Reader's know that I loathe e-books and have vowed never to get an e-book reader.  A few months ago the Nook seller at Barnes and Nobles approached me to take a look at his little device, and I bit his head off.  (I think he was a little surprised at my ferocity over the device.)

Anyway,  now no one can see from my shelf that I have read this book, I can't loan it to you, and when I am reminiscing about favorite books, I'll need to stare at a tiny icon on a screen.  The actual reading experience, however, was probably not any different from holding a book.

When I was three chapters from the end, my husband took his i-pad and went to work.  I had the day off, so I went to Barnes and Nobles, planted myself in a comfy chair and read and sobbed my way through the last three chapters in the intimacy of the bookstore.  Afterwards, I bought Mockingjay, the third book and happily began reading the real book version of that.

So if you began reading The Hunger Games after my last post, I think you will enjoy this sequel.  It is storytelling at its finest including a gut wrenching love story.

Why I don't like e-books

Pretty!

• When you accidentally leave your e-book on the plane, you loose a $200 device and your entire library.
•  All e-books look the same.  I do judge books by their cover and the glossy picture on the front of the screen doesn’t do it for me.
• You can’t lend or borrow an e-book.
• You don’t know what others are reading, which means you can’t start conversations about a book, or find commonalities with other humans over books.   All our reading is suddenly done anonymously.  One of the pleasures of reading is sharing what you read.  I bought my husband a book for his birthday only to find out he had already downloaded it and was reading it. 
• Books look great lined up on shelves.  They have a feel and a smell and a place.  E-books are just pixels on screens. 
• Curling up with a good e-book doesn’t even sound like fun.
• When e-books take over we will loose the most important public gathering place: the public library. 
• When I drop my books, I pick them up.  If I drop a book reader, I have a pile of glass. 
•   Academics have a harder time citing passages from e-books since page numbers in e-books are all relative.
• What will happen to book fairs and book sales and book stores? 
• E-books don’t have a smell or a feel or carry nostalgia.  When my books are lined up on the shelves I can peruse them and remember where I was and who I was with at each one.  When I was 24 I backpacked through Europe and carried one book: a volume of women's travel adventures.  It lasted me most of the trip and started up several conversations with fellow female travelers.  I still have the book and I think of my adventure often when I see the book on my shelf.
• What about children's books like pop-ups and touchy-feely books and board books?  I'm not letting my toddler run around with a reading device in her hands.
• Everyone talks about the environment.  Does an e-book reader recycle?

 (I’ll grant you e-books are great for travelers, and for people with eyesight problems who can’t read small print, or people with small spaces who can’t have a huge library.  Sometimes I feel like one of those musty old writers who still write on typewriters and can’t see the benefit of a word processor.)  

Please comment and tell me about your vision of our book future.  Are they destined to end up only in resale shops like LPs?  Why do you like or not like the e-book reader?  

For all you e book readers out there

We have an on-going debate in our household over portable e-reading devices.  I say bad.  Husband says, good for the environment.  (He has managed to loose two of them on airplanes at this point.)

I stumbled across this fabulous series of youtube films pitting one of those devices against the book in a series of 10 films.  Guess what?  The book wins every time.

This is my favorite of the 10 films.  Go to youtube to enjoy the other nine.