Reading Books on Kindle

Today I finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I started to write about it, but then I realized I had more to say about reading on Kindle than about Blink. It’s an excellent book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This post won’t do it justice, so you should read it yourself.

Ok, about reading on Kindle (for reference, it’s a Kindle Paperwhite 2nd gen). My favorite thing about Kindle is the backlight. I love not needing to find perfect lighting. No annoying lamps, windows, or flashlights. It’s truly a dream come true. I love the idea of having thousands of books in my hand, all concentrated in one device. I also love that I can so easily get new books: they’re just a few clicks away, free from the library. Kindle is perfect for those “it’s 1 AM and I must read the sequel” moments.

But for me, Kindle is not without its turbulent downsides. I usually read physical books and Blink is one of the few books I’ve read entirely on Kindle. I felt adrift throughout my time reading, with no idea where I was in the book. Granted, there is the contents page and optional page numbers, but it’s impossible for me to translate ebook page numbers into anything meaningful. The best way I could describe it is floating in a white void while the story plays in my mind. A physical book has a logical progression. There’s a distinct beginning, middle, and end. The middle is a constantly growing and changing form as the pages pile on my left and dissipate on my right. On Kindle, the middle doesn’t exist in any real sense. It just goes on and on until it runs right into the ending. The words appear and disappear and the remnants of the old letters linger, deposed, until they’re wiped away in a flash of total inversion. Blink lives in my memory as an amorphous glare; all its ideas gasping for a physical space to rest. I can’t avoid the feeling that it won’t remain. It will take flight and find the printing press where physical Blinks are made, squeeze in, and become real.

When I remember Outliers, which I recently read as a physical book, there’s a structure. I can almost page through the book in my mind, recall its various sections by the state of the middle when I read them. It’s far from perfect, but the physical structure of the book transferred to my mind and it has the space it needs.

Perhaps I could have mitigated some of these strange tides.
I could’ve turned on page numbers, progress percentages, and just checked what chapter I was on. I could’ve read it over the span of a week instead of only two days. Although, I know inside that none of these would’ve made much difference. Books need to live in the real world. They can be contained by the digital realm, but the transfer to the mind fails, at least for me.

I wish Kindle books felt like real books.
Yours truly,

Jacob