Nerd Friday: Book Vs Kindle

Last week on Nerd Friday was post in which i declared my love of the DVD, old school i know but i am about to talk more about my old school nerd love for a topic much more debated, (at least with my family household) the divided opinion on the Book vs. the Kindle! For me as someone who has just spent three years studying literature i love a book. My argument for books is that you can write notes around the text and years later you can come back to them and see what you thought at the time that you were reading it and as your life has changed so does you outlook on different points of story. In my copy of A Streetcar Named Desire there are the notes i made from my A Levels and when i had to return to the book during my degree it was fascinating seeing what i had written and the way i used to analyse a text. With a kindle i know you can write notes but it does not have the same effect. The notes aren't personal and in your hand writing, they are formal and organised. Nothing i ever write on my books is organised as anyone else coming to look at that book would have no idea what the notes say but i do which is all that is important.

I recognise the inconvenience of having to carry books around with you, trust me after three years of carrying multiple books into uni everyday was a massive hassle. However i could probably have gotten half of these books on my tablet but i didn't and it would have hurt my arm a lot less to just take my tablet in everyday so i can see why people have them for that. However when people say that they can take their tablet on holiday so they don't have to take a book with them baffles me. I would never trust taking my tablet to the beach or anywhere near water (which is where you are probably going on holiday) There is so much potential for something to go wrong, you could lose it and the chance of breaking it is heightened. Whereas if you take a cheap book, which you don't really care about, it doesn't matter if you spill stuff on it or break it. Plus the benefit of being able to take more than one story away with you is quite appealing but if you are on holiday and manage to finish more than one book you aren't holidaying right. You should be enjoying yourself rather than reading and that comes from someone who loves reading.

My final point for the classic form of the book is that your electronic device does not have the same smell and general joy from a newly downloaded story. A new book has a fresh smell about it. Call me weird but it does and i like it and there is just something about holding it in your hand and being able to tell how far you have gotten in the story. My books store a lot of pictures and pieces of paper that were relevant to my life at the time when i was reading that book and looking back through them is kind of like a journey through my life which definitely can not happen on an electronic device.

The point of this post is not to disregard the importance of the electronic device to reading, as it has made reading more pleasurable to some people but i just want to point out the ways in which books are important and such still be favored over the electronic version.