98% of my reading is done in bed, at night. After a few years of reading books only on my Kindle, the other night I started one that isn’t available digitally. It isn’t very big but I found it heavy and awkward, the light next to my bed was too bright (but necessary), and I had to hold the book uncomfortably close to my face to be able to read it without my glasses on. All things that the Kindle mitigates. I’ve moved the book from my nightstand to my coffee table. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll start something else on the Kindle to read at night, but I probably will.
That’s something I do sometimes miss: there will be times when I want to flip back to remind myself of something, and it would just be soooo much easier/faster with printed pages.
That used to be one of my favorite things! I’ve found, though, that downloaded samples give me a similar feeling now. Whenever I come across something that sounds interesting I’ll download a free sample, and I put them all in their own folder (called a “collection”). When the time comes to pick something new, I browse through all of the samples. Not *exactly *the same thing, but close enough for me.
I “stumble” over new books via friends who recommend things on Facebook, and – frequently – via the “Whatcha Readin’?” threads here.
Ha!
That’s something else I miss about physical books: always instantly knowing exactly where I am in terms of the overall book. It took a little while for it to stop feeling weird that page 1 was indistinguishable from page 300. I use my Kindle’s “progress” display for that now – it’s not the same as just knowing, but I will frequently check how much of the book is remaining. In fact, if I accidentally change the setting and that information goes away, I notice it almost immediately and turn it back on. For whatever reason, I always need to have some idea of where I am in that regard.
It can be a PITA to keep flipping back to read end notes (as opposed to footnotes). Meanwhile, I’ve seen ebooks handle notes in three different ways: with a link to a pop-up box that’s easy to close, with a link to the end of the book where the text of the note is, or with no link at all.
With mine, a Kindle Paperwhite, you click on the note number and it pops it up. You read, then close, and you’re back to where you were.
Because the page doesn’t show footnotes at the bottom, unlike print (this is generally true on the Kindle, in my experience, but a few books are set up so that the “footnotes” are at the end of the chapter), I sometimes will miss the notes. In print, you can see that there was a footnote even if you overlook the superscript.
Right now, I can’t remember whether the link goes both ways. If you go through the text and arrive at the endnotes, I can’t remember if you can click on them to go to the text where they are linked. There have been times when I’m reading print where that would be a nice feature because I can’t find the !@$%# superscript.
My impression is that these are things that the publisher/formatter has to set up. Whether they work or not depends on whether they’re enabled for that particular book.
