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Blogs by Jerome Parisse
The ebook epiphany! 5/30/2010 3:15:55 AM
I recently went on a five-week round-the-world trip, a mixture of work, family visits and holiday. My biggest problem before leaving for the trip, apart from how I was going to pack clothes for the cold of a Northern Hemisphere winter as well as the heat of the Caribbean, was how many books I could take with me. Of course books can always be bought during a trip, but I hate having to leave them behind. I love to read, but I also love books as objects. I even like to smell them to make sure they’re right! The pleasure of reading is enhanced by the pleasure of holding something in my hand that I can look at, carry around with me, and re-read as I wish. However five weeks of reading wasn’t going to work with the grand 22 kilograms of luggage I was allowed to schlep around. After giving it some thought, I decided that it was time to try and buy an ebook. The idea of being able to store 5,000 books on one small device was appealing – definitely more reading that I could achieve in five weeks! I chose the Amazon Kindle, because of its ability to buy and download books from anywhere around the world.
When the device arrived, I downloaded the few books I had wanted to read for a while, noticing that their price was half what I would have had to pay for the printed version, and off I went. I thought I would not really enjoy the experience, but there was all this reading I was so looking forward to. To be honest, it took me about a day to be fully comfortable with reading from my ebook. After that, it was as if I had always read books electronically. And the beauty was that it all fitted on one small device. My friends in Australia showed some interest: they had not seen many ebooks yet, but some of them had thought about buying one. On the plane, several flight attendants stopped by my seat to ask what I was doing, and left impressed. In France, everybody thought I was coming from another planet: An ebook, are you kidding me? My mother and my best friend swore they would never read a book electronically. And anyway it’s not as if they could do it: the ebook revolution still has to hit the country! In the States, during the second part of my trip, I regularly came across people with ebooks, indeed many with Kindles.
I am hooked! I have come back and keep buying electronic books and reading them on my Kindle. I still buy and read printed books though (Old habits take a long time to die). I have asked my publisher how fast they can organise to have my latest novel available as ebook on a number of platforms. The ebook revolution has finally hit me. And there is no turning back!
