By William Kristoph

Longtime eBook / eReader Hater

Much like Twitter, I didn’t understand eBooks usefulness at first. I thought it was a silly idea to potentially pay slightly more for an electronic copy of a book than for the real thing, as is the case in paperbacks. Sure, hard covers are more expensive than their eBook counterparts, but there’s rarely a book that I’m so interested in that I must have it now, before it’s available in paperback. Plus, I’ve never been impressed with the reading experience on a Kindle or Nook. I tried them out on different occasions, and I felt like they were slow, cheaply made and didn’t provide a good user experience. The eBooks were always a great idea in theory, but in practice, they were terrible.

My First iBook Experience

Honestly, I played with a couple of free iBooks here and there, but I didn’t thoroughly test out the iBooks app until I wanted a copy of R.A. Dickey’s, “Wherever I Wind Up.” Since I had Apple App Store credit, I gave iBooks a chance. It turned out that I really enjoy reading a book in iBook format and I’ll probably never go back to dealing with paper versions.

Five Things I Love About Reading an iBook:

1. I can have large format (portrait) or small / paperback format (landscape) depending on my mood.
2. The built-in highlighter function is useful and very easy to use.
3. It’s easy to grab a book from the iBook Store, instead of trekking to Barnes & Noble I might read more books.
4. The cost is relatively low, even though it’s still hard to comprehend $10-$15 for something that feels less tangible than a regular book.
5. The biggest advantage to iBooks, and what I love most about it is:

iBooks Mean No More Paper

This is a huge advantage for me. Household clutter is something that my wife and I despise. Books make great decorations, but we have a habit of letting them pile up and take up shelf space. The iBook is nicely contained to the electronic world. On a Retina iPad it the text is crisp, the screen is bright and the experience is just as good, if not better than, paper. On a trip, I can have multiple books in a device that I’d be carrying with me anyway.  I finally “got it.” It’s all about convenience and ease of access. If only technology like this had existed when I was in high school and college! I’ll never go back to paper books. Congratulations technology, you win again.