The experience of the move to, and use of e-books in Prescott’s article in some ways mirrors my own. As Prescott has described, e-books are eminently more portable than real books. My very old early generation Kindle is probably bulky by today’s standards, but fits into most bags, is lightweight, and can be used in either hand, having satisfyingly clicky page turn buttons on both sides of the device. As Prescott also noted, the convenience of having books on the phone is amazing – your book is in your pocket, and when travelling, there is no need for lots of different chargers!
I read the Sue Thomas article cited by Prescott and agree that the association of reading and place is a very real one. I think everyone who reads for relaxation has their chair, their corner, their preferred reading spot, and I believe that the positive associations and benefits of finding this spot go beyond reading. My reading spot was originally just that – a comfortable corner of the sofa in a room that gets the first light in the morning – but over time this has become the space I go for a few minutes at the end of the work day, or with coffee before the house wakes, or to gather my thoughts and find calm, even without a book.
I will never go back to the book book….for certain things. Where I differ from Prescott is that my e-reading has been purely for entertainment. If I want to read a book about teaching, or parenting or anything non-fiction, I want a real book I can mark and write in, and return to without endless clicks. We reflected on this a couple of weeks ago as part of our elective and I commented that I view my e-reader and e-books as the literary version of Netflix – for binge reading and pure entertainment but not for serious pursuits.
That said these last three weeks have somewhat changed this, and while not on my Kindle, I do now read online, where before I would have printed readings to annotate by hand. I think this is a result of online teaching and correcting during the pandemic – digital formats no longer feel unwieldy and unfamiliar. I have found that downloading and storing the articles on the Drive to annotate digitally has saved me time, and allowed me to access the articles quickly from any device when I had a spare 15 minutes to read and make notes on the go. I still mindmap my ‘takeaways’ on paper to clarify my thinking, but having seen some impressive mindmaps in the reflections of others on the course, I may be persuaded to attempt this digitally too.
