. . .let me count the ways. 😉
Of course, one very big reason I appreciate eBooks is storage. With thousands of volumes of hardcopy books clogging our home, storing electronic copies of text is a BIG advantage for us. Sure, I miss the tactile sensations of reading hardcopy when reading eBooks, but the text’s the thing, you know.
Then there’s the thing with aging eyes. With eBooks, I can select from a wide range of text sizes and even, in some formats, toggle between serif and non-serif fonts to ease my eyes. Very nice.
Portability is a big plus, too. When I go out with my Kindle Fire, I carry several hundred eBooks with me, some of them as yet unread and others re-readable. Very nice!
Oh, there are other reasons I like eBooks (less expensive, overall, than hardcopy, easier to shop for, immediate lookup of etymologies, historical references, artwork, etc.) but The Big Reason I really appreciate eBooks hails back to a habit I’ve had for years, one that has grown ever more “necessary” for me to engage in as time has gone on, and a habit that is a real no-no to give expression when reading library books: I edit my books to be more as they would have been had the writers had literate editors in the publication loop. *heh* Marking up books–lining through a “dele” (from “deleatur”–editorial deletions), correcting a spelling, grammar or word usage error, cleaning up an awkward descriptive narrative here, an amphibolous phrase there and the odd “WTF?!?” in between are all serious “Bad Dog”s *heh* when applied to library books. My own copies? Full of such things.
And then there are the other notes, usually underlined or starred and noted by page number on the end pages of books, adding background or commentary correcting language or historical problems or simply reminders to look further into something mentioned in th text. And example from a recent read is where a character–a Roman Catholic priest, no less!–translated “Sic transit gloria mundi” as “the glory of man is fleeting”. *feh* Any even semi-literate person knows better. “Sic transit gloria mundi” is more properly, “Thus passes the glory of the world,” or more casually, “the world’s glory is fleeting, transient, impermanent.” No reference to man in the phrase at all, except that man is a part of temporal existence.
Things like that irritate me, so correcting them scratches an itch.
[The observant reader of this blog might at this point–or perhaps at an even earlier point *heh*–say, “Yeh, if you’re so smart, why is your blog filled with all kinds of convoluted constructions, obscurantist phraseology, and even the occasional misspelled word and lousy grammatical construction?” Fair question. This blog is written as dialog, spoken word, and I cut myself slack here as much as I do authors when they are writing dialog. *shrugs* And who says I have to be consistent anyway? *heh*Nevertheless, I cut myself no slack and am abashed when I re-read an old post and find a misused word or obvious grammar error that cannot be legitimately placed at the feet of casual speech.]
I like the annotation features offered in my Kindle Fire for making snarky corrections to text. In fact, since the silly onscreen keyboard is a bit irksome to use, the very fact that it slows down my reading is often a plus (I do tend to read things too quickly.). But for annotations, nothing beats reading an eBook in html format in a browser on a plain ole everyday computer. Open the html-formatted book in the browser, open each chapter in a text editor and switch back and forth between them for inserting comments, corrections and amendments in the text: fun for me.
Note: my notations do include interesting tidbits to explore further, as I said above, and also amusing lil things, like a character with only one eye appearing described as looking on a dangerous ally, “The big one. . . seemed ambivalent but kept a real close eye on her.” *heh* “Eye”. Funny.
More. . .
One small distraction when inserting notes into eBooks formatted as html files is the really, really sloppy html I see a lot of. *sigh* It’s almost as though many of them were formatted in a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage that inserts all sorts of extraneous, useless, completely unnecessary crap. Oh, I don’t mind deprecated html tags that’ve been replaced with more “acceptable” markup lingo so much, but so much of the garbage markup is simply unnecessary.
