Skip to main content

The Wonderful Simplicity of an E-reader

One other thing I did not mention in my Kindle Touch review was that I liked how it simplified things and made me concentrate purely on reading, compared to the iPad where I'd read for a bit, then wonder what's going in the Twitterverse or would suddenly feel the compulsion to check the history of instant noodles in Europe on Wikipedia.

That doesn't happen when I'm reading on the Kindle. The device disappears and I'm lost in the book, which is how it should be.

Librarian Bohyun Kim seems to agree:
The greatest problem I had with an iPad ‘as an e-reader’ was that aside from its weight and the eye-straining screen, I could not really concentrate on reading for a long time. I don’t know if this is a non-issue for others with stronger willpower. But for me, this was certainly a big problem. While reading, I would get easily distracted into web surfing, checking e-mails, and reading tweets and Facebook updates.  On the other hand, on this single-purpose device, it was easy to continue reading for a much longer time. Sometimes, I would have an urge to go online and do something else. But often I would just ignore the urge as I simply didn’t feel like moving.
Of course, you could just read a paper book instead but where's the fun in that?
Labels:

Comments

  1. John Ling22/2/12 7:06 am

    I agree with you absolutely, Ted. I haven't bought a print book for three years now. Glad to see you've jumped on to the bandwagon! It's a brave new world indeed. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ted Mahsun22/2/12 11:34 am

    Wow, three years. I don't think I'll stop buying print books, mostly because books in Malay still depend on dead trees.

    Doesn't stop me from hassling local publishers to start publishing e-books though but the response I've mostly gotten from them has been rather in the vein of "lolwut".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ron Easton for Dads UnLimited23/2/12 11:26 am

    I found your blog through the A-Z sign up list. Lots of good information and fun reviews!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ted Mahsun23/2/12 11:31 am

    Thanks for dropping by, Ron!

    Your blog looks neat as well. I'm a dad as well, with a two year old girl and another on the way. I'll check back once in a while.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Elizabeth Tai12/3/12 11:27 pm

    I lost count how many times I was rudely awakened by the smack of the ipad on my forehead while I read in bed. ;) I love the thing, but not as an eReader. My Nook wins!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...
15 comments
Read more

REVIEW: Confessions of an Old Boy by Kam Raslan

Kam Raslan's right. In the preface for his new book, Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato' Hamid Adventures he writes that we've known Dato' Hamid all our lives. Seeing as my own dad is an old boy of MCKK, the people I get to meet when he drags me to an Old Boy function and the people he tells me of, reflect the characters found in Kam's book. It really does feel like I've known Dato' Hamid all my life. Dato' Hamid is a civil servant of the Tunku Abdul Rahman generation. He is the sort of person you rarely see nowadays, a fine example of the anachronistic Malay. This generation, groomed in the ways of the colonial British would be out of place not just in 21st century Malaysia, but in Britain too. And yet, Dato' Hamid, in all his snobbishness and patronising ways, is essentially a Malaysian. Without people like him, our country would probably never exist at all. At least not like we know it now. I'm glad that Kam Raslan decided to capture this ...
5 comments
Read more