fourworlds

I’ve been a lover of books and a voracious reader for as far back as I can remember. You know the kind: One of those kids who stays up hours after being sent to bed, reading surreptitiously under tented covers with a big flashlight.  Over the decades, hardly a night has gone by that I haven’t escaped into a half hour of reading before submitting to sleep.

I’m a bit of a geek and happily spend many hours each day staring into a computer monitor. Nevertheless, I have a hard time mentally processing on-screen documents longer than a page or two. My office bookshelf is filled with bound volumes of .pdf files I’ve printed over the years. So despite my lust for gadgets and reading, I’ve never flirted too hard with the idea of spending a few hundred dollars to buy an Amazon Kindle e-book reader. But when I saw the announcement for Kindle for iPhone, I couldn’t resist.The software was free and I could start the next novel in the series I’d been devouring within minutes. And that’s what I did.

To my surprise, reading book-length works on my iPhone screen has been a pleasure. I’ve tried to figure out why the experience is so much better than reading on a regular computer monitor. What I’ve come up with so far is that it’s a combination of the iPhone’s relatively small column size and the book-like reading distance its form-factor elicits. I’ve become so enamoured that I set my bound books aside, turn off my nightstand lamp and read by the soothing light of the iPhone every night.

Having an almost infinite supply of books in my pocket is a sheer joy.