Hello and welcome back to another Sunday! The weather is wonderful and getting warmer, flowers are starting to come up and bloom, and spring actually feels like it is on the way. Sorry for missing last week, but life has been super hectic since we decided to do a kitchen renovation. This week, I want to discuss print books and ebooks.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people tend to skew heavily to one side or the other when it comes to preference. Yet I kind of camp out in the middle, not having a clear preference for one while seeing the benefits of each. Here goes:

Print books are the OG when it comes to reading. They never need to be charged, and nothing quite feels like sitting down and opening up a new book. Flipping open the first few pages, and getting ready to start a brand new story feels like there’s a whole world of possibilities in my hands. There’s the smell of a book that can’t be matched (yes, I’m a book sniffer, don’t judge me), and in a pinch, if you’re reading a big enough book, it can be used as a weapon. I love being able to visually see how many pages I have left in a book, and being able to tab a page with a quote I like or something I want to remember for my review. I’m also a big fan of being able to flip back to maps, character lists, or glossaries, since my memory isn’t what it used to be, and sometimes I find it hard to keep everything organized in my head. 

Then again, there are definite upsides to ebooks. I’m going to talk about kindle specifically because that’s the ebook reader that I use, and I’m not familiar with any other type. So they may be different, but I suspect that they all function pretty much the same. One of my favorite things about ebooks is how if I come across a word that I don’t understand I can just hold my finger over the word and the definition will pop up. It even translates foreign languages and pulls up a brief summary of wikipedia as well, which is pretty cool. Another feature that is amazing is the fact that I can read this any time of the day or night, and I don’t have to worry about having the lights on since it’s backlit. I can add so many books to this and it still weighs the same few ounces it always has, and I don’t have to do the whole “how many books is the right amount to bring on vacation, and can I fit them all in my bag without it being too heavy?” Plus, I can access ebooks through the library or any retailer and get them delivered to my kindle within seconds. You know how when driving with the GPS on, there’s that overwhelming need to beat the expected arrival time, or is it just me? Apparently that applies to the expected finish time for the ebook as well—my kindle gives me a rundown of how long it’ll take to finish the chapter and/or entire book, as well as the percentage of book that I’ve finished, and I notice that I read faster when I read ebooks. Plus, there’s all these great deals, like Kindle Unlimited and super cheap book sales!

So what do you think? Are you team physical book, team ebook, or team both depending on your mood/situation like me?