07-05-2021, 12:24 AM
I'm just wondering what members prefer if they read books. Do they prefer paper books, or electronic readers like Kindle?
Off late with load shedding and hours of electricity downtime, I've discovered the love of reading again. What I do is support our local swop shops where one can buy second hand books, and then return them for an X value to purchase more. First it went slowly, but I now find myself quite passionate about my book reading again.
My preference has always been a nice paper book as there is something special with turning pages, and feeling real paper pages. But then I had a problem. A recent author I discovered, and particularly liked very much, was not that well known. I couldn't find most of his titles in the swop shops, or even regular book stores. I then checked out Amazon not sure whether I'd want to go through the upheaval of customs in South Africa (it's a serious big and very expensive deal to "import" anything here), and just for the heck of it googled free e-books. I then discovered a wealth of online libraries. I discovered one I liked and was then able to download all of the books I wanted for free.
This was a brand new way of reading books for me so there was a little bit of a learning curve involved of course. First challenge was the extension epub didn't work with with the Kindle App on my Samsung Galaxy Tab2. I then researched alternative readers and discovered FullREader which I downloaded from Google Play Store on my Tablet. I'm using Samsung Galaxy Tab2 very old tablet, but still with a decent 3 GB RAM and 32GB storage. I found the books taking up the minimum space so no problem with storage. Second big challenge was that reading books drains the Samsung Tablet battery in no time. I then had to learn how to turn everything on the Tablet off in Android, and now have the tablet on Airport Mode, Wifi and all connection turned off as well. Additionally, I purchased a cheap PowerBank that works quite well when needed. I however soon acquired a rhythm with reading approx 50 pages before a recharge is needed.
In the end I took to electronic reading like a duck to water and although I still prefer my hard copy books, I'm enjoying electronic very much. There are many pros for electronic reading vs paper books. I like that the text is backlit and one can change the fonts if one wanted to do so. Electronic reading is probably much cleaner than my second hand books - particularly considering Covid 19 times. If ever I get to travel again, I'd be able to read a book anywhere, day or night.
Off late with load shedding and hours of electricity downtime, I've discovered the love of reading again. What I do is support our local swop shops where one can buy second hand books, and then return them for an X value to purchase more. First it went slowly, but I now find myself quite passionate about my book reading again.
My preference has always been a nice paper book as there is something special with turning pages, and feeling real paper pages. But then I had a problem. A recent author I discovered, and particularly liked very much, was not that well known. I couldn't find most of his titles in the swop shops, or even regular book stores. I then checked out Amazon not sure whether I'd want to go through the upheaval of customs in South Africa (it's a serious big and very expensive deal to "import" anything here), and just for the heck of it googled free e-books. I then discovered a wealth of online libraries. I discovered one I liked and was then able to download all of the books I wanted for free.
This was a brand new way of reading books for me so there was a little bit of a learning curve involved of course. First challenge was the extension epub didn't work with with the Kindle App on my Samsung Galaxy Tab2. I then researched alternative readers and discovered FullREader which I downloaded from Google Play Store on my Tablet. I'm using Samsung Galaxy Tab2 very old tablet, but still with a decent 3 GB RAM and 32GB storage. I found the books taking up the minimum space so no problem with storage. Second big challenge was that reading books drains the Samsung Tablet battery in no time. I then had to learn how to turn everything on the Tablet off in Android, and now have the tablet on Airport Mode, Wifi and all connection turned off as well. Additionally, I purchased a cheap PowerBank that works quite well when needed. I however soon acquired a rhythm with reading approx 50 pages before a recharge is needed.
In the end I took to electronic reading like a duck to water and although I still prefer my hard copy books, I'm enjoying electronic very much. There are many pros for electronic reading vs paper books. I like that the text is backlit and one can change the fonts if one wanted to do so. Electronic reading is probably much cleaner than my second hand books - particularly considering Covid 19 times. If ever I get to travel again, I'd be able to read a book anywhere, day or night.