Ebooks

I've just been reading my first ever ebook.  I downloaded Jennifer Egan's Visit from the Goon Squad to my netbook from the public library.  I've got it for 21 days, after which it will dissolve into bits & disappear.  I've almost finished reading it, and have been thinking about the experience of reading electronic versus print.  I found it very easy to read on the netbook.  I read quite quickly & what I hadn't liked about trying an e-reader previously was that not much text is displayed on the screen so you have to keep 'turning the page'.  However I found that hovering my cursor over the down arrow was very simple, and I could whizz through the pages, more easily in fact than holding a book.  However, what I find interesting is that I miss the sense of knowing where I am in a book by looking visually at where the bookmark is in the book.  It's made the story feel a bit disjointed.  The Goon Squad is a series of chapters about a group of people at different times in their lives, and with different narrators, so it is perhaps more difficult to follow than a traditional consecutive narrative.  But I think there is something about the physical sensation of getting through a book that's missing.  Also, I often read in bed, lying on my side with the book resting on the pillow a page at a time.  And I can't do that with the netbook, and I don't think I'd be able to do it easily with an e-reader, because of needing to turn the pages quickly.    The other thing which feels completely counter-intuitive is using electricity to read.   I know I could get some sort of solar recharger (maybe?) for my netbook, but at the moment it draws power ultimately from the national grid, and so seems wasteful.

But it's been a very easy way to get a library book.  And as someone who sometimes reads very quickly, and then forgets to take the books back, it's a good alternative to print, but I wouldn't want it to be the only method of getting books in future.