So, I’m laying in bed at 4 a.m. and reading “Harvest Home,” which is just a jolly fun read at this time of year.
The author, Thomas Tryon, is describing the various goings-on at the yearly Agnes Fair (bro, you want to stay far away from that fair, trust me on this) when he unleashes a couple words with which I’m not familiar.
“What the devil is a ‘cheapjack?'” I ask of the darkness. “And exactly what IS a ‘jackanape?'”
Now, words mean a lot to me, so I cannot simply put those questions to rest — I’d be thinking about them the rest of the night and wouldn’t be able to sleep, you know.
In the old days, I’d have to drag myself out of the warm bed and then go rifling through the house in search of a dictionary? But these days? Naw. I’m reading a Kindle book, you see, so all I have to do is press my finger against the mystery word and its definition will appear like magic.
Oh, the conveniences of an ebook, I don’t know if I have enough space to describe them all. And yet, I wasn’t always this way. Seven or eight years ago, I was one of those purists who swore he would never betray the old-fashioned print book by doing his reading on an electronic gadget. Nossir, I declared. Digital books are an obscenity!
Then I discovered samples and my life changed for ever.
Samples, for you rubes who haven’t gotten there yet, are usually the first 50 pages or so of an ebook that you can read for free if you’re unsure whether the book in question is worth shelling out eight bucks for.
Simply find your book in Kindle store, click “send a free sample” and BAM! Those select pages are now on your Kindle, your phone or whatever gadget you happen to be using to satisfy your reading jones.
A few months ago, I was unsure whether I wanted to read the massive tome “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” so I ordered a sample which, I swear, turned out to be 200 pages long. That was more than enough to convince me that I absolutely had to read this book, even at $16 for the Kindle version.
There have been many books that I’ve decided against reading because something in the sample just turned me off. Bad dialogue, clunky prose, whatever. And that’s just the beginning of the benefits of going digital.
When you go on vacation or just take a drive to the beach one summer afternoon, you never have to worry about packing just the right book. Not if you’re into ebooks, anyway. With ebooks, all of your volumes are collected right there on your gadget, which in my case is my phone using the Kindle app.
A Kindle with 8 megabytes of space can store as many as 6,000 ebooks, which means that some of us are walking around with small libraries in our back pockets, and it doesn’t even make our butts look big!
With a print book, losing a bookmark can spell catastrophe. Who wants to go thumbing through hundreds of pages just to find out where you left off? Never mind all that. An ebook will keep track of where you left off and you can always use the “find” function to get anywhere else inside the book you want to be.
When I was a prehistoric print book reader, I was always battling with various book lights. Some clipped onto the book itself, but they would invariably lose battery power or tumble off the book altogether, sinking me into darkness and causing me to lose my place. I tried balancing a small flashlight on my lap, but that annoyed the cat and never worked right, anyway.
An ebook, on the other hand, is backlit, and you can adjust that light any way you want until it’s juuuuust right for your sleepy eyes. You can also adjust the font size, which for some may eliminate the need for reading glasses.
For me, the conveniences of the ebook are too numerous to ignore and so, like that, I’ve betrayed my earlier oath and ditched all those old bound volumes that used to so enthrall me. My shame is great, yet I regret nothing. By keeping the Kindle app on my phone, I always have my book, no matter where I roam.
I have great respect for people who insist on reading print books exclusively, but for me, although I still prefer crank car windows and an ’80s haircut, it’s electronic reading all the way.
By the way, a “cheapjack” is “a seller of cheap inferior goods, typically a hawker at a fair or market.”
“Jackanape” is defined as “an impertinent person” or “a tame monkey.”
And now that I know that, I can put the phone down and go to sleep.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
