Last year, the majority of books that I read were ebooks. This isn’t anything unusual for me. Ever since I purchased my first Kindle many years back, I’ve been reading books in this format. I read a few Apple Books here and there on my iPad, but mostly, I use Amazon’s device to consume novels.
However, this year things may change a bit. As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I’m doing the PopSugar and the 52 Book Club reading challenges. One of the main reasons I decided to take on the challenges was to get through some of the books on my bookshelves that I’ve purchased. Like many of you, there are a lot of unread books on my shelves that I keep meaning to get to. So with only a few exceptions, all of the books that I’ll be reading for the challenges this year are actual physical books that I own.
Now, this isn’t to say that I never read physical books as I do get quite a few of them from the library throughout the year. But they account for only about 20% of my overall reading. Historically, almost all my reading consists of ebooks.
This is funny because I constantly extol the virtues of paper books and talk about how much I love them, how there’s nothing like the feel/smell of an actual book, etc. Yet, when I examine my reading habits, I see that physical books make up only a tiny portion of my reading and the main reason for that is convenience. For instance, rather than carrying around a heavy book with me whenever I go to the doctor’s or another appointment, it’s easier to tuck my Kindle in my jacket pocket, and I have my entire library with me. I also don’t have to lug 15 books with me when I go on vacation, which is especially an issue given that I take a lot of vacations on my motorcycle. This all makes me think that perhaps I’ll write up a future post on paper books vs. ebooks. But that isn’t the purpose of this post, however. Today, I just wanted to mention that I’ll be making a massive change to my reading habits which will entail mainly reading paper books in the coming year.
I’m curious how I’ll take to it again. No doubt I’ll miss the convenience of my Kindle as well as the ability to quickly lookup words on the fly. But I will say that whenever I do read a physical book, I tend almost always to enjoy the experience of it. I love the feel of the book in my hands, the subtle noise of a page turn, and the immediate physical representation of how much of the book is remaining.
This isn’t to say that I won’t be reading ebooks this year, as I’m sure a few electronic ARCs will cross my path (though I plan on not requesting as many ARCs as usual). But my main focus will be on clearing out some of those titles from my physical TBR on my groaning shelves. I think it will be kind of fun to watch the number of books on my shelves dwindle as the year progresses.