The Old Man and the e… Reader

I would like to be able to talk about my experiences of using an eReader, but I can’t. The only time I have ever used an eReader or a tablet was a year ago, sitting next to a friend of mine at our annual teachers’ convention. He was reading something on his wee Archos one, and let me test it out. It was neat. Kind of. It didn’t really grab me, though. In fact, the only one that has appealed to me yet is the only-in-USA-so-far Amazon Kindle Fire.

Why does it grab my attention more than its predecessors? Well, it has a full-colour touchscreen, can play movies, music… lots of other things other than reading. What I really want, I think, is a lightweight Internet-and-media ready tablet. If it lets me read books on it, then great. If not, that’s OK, too.

Why? Well, I’m not a very avid reader. Wait. Let me rephrase that. I am an avid reader – just not of novels. I don’t have the time to read them, to be honest. Wait. Let me rephrase that, too. In the spare time that I have, I choose to do a lot of computer or tech-related things, which doesn’t leave me much time to read novels (at least in a timely way). I am like many of my younger junior high students… I am often just not into reading something long and drawn-out. I still read all the time, though – online.

I think reading online affords this older junior-high-style-reader all the things that I want. Much of my reading is done in bite-size chunks – I do check Facebook and my mail (very) regularly, but I read the news mostly. I read articles on music news, CBC, TSN, beer blogs… and I create such content online, too. The Internet has turned into my self-driven learning space, really. I can search for what I want, read full articles, or just skim them for what I need. I can follow links in articles or text to learn more about specific things. I can listen to my own music while I do it. I can watch related videos, sometimes embedded in the same page.

I think the gist of what I’m getting at here is mainly that the ways texts on the Internet are enhanced is what entices me and makes it useful for me. Up until now, eReaders have not done that, leaving tablets the probable next step for me (I don’t know why, but  I envision myself using one around the house, surfing through the Internet, course work, and anything else with ease and portability… like it’s a huge step over my laptop or something). With devices like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, though… eReaders have all-of-a-sudden come into my market. With more capabilities, they are now more useful and enticing to more people. If I want to read with it, great. If not, I can do my “regular” things on it, too. It seems about the “right” size – portable, but not too small (you can see in the picture that a hand can go all the way around it, which is semi-subconsciously important to me, I think). Its $199 price point is awfully nice, too, since the “best” tablets so far seem to be in the $400 and up range. Maybe once this device (or something similar) becomes available to me, I’ll make the shift to it. If my circa-2001 cell phone is any indication, though, maybe I won’t. If I don’t, I just hope that kid at the China Garden (or anyone else) doesn’t look at my laptop in the near future and ask (as he did similarly for my cell phone last year), “Is that a real computer?”

Posted in: Week 06: eBooks