Reading, Knitting, Planning

Reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin on my iPad.  Yes, the book is excellent, but I want to talk a bit about the method of delivery. 

Since I read quite a bit, I often get my books from the library which means they are good, old-fashioned, paper books.  Advantages:  Free, huge selection, tactile.  Disadvantages:  Longer books are heavy and awkward, some books have a 2 week limit, not all fonts are good for my terrible eyes. 

Then there is the Kindle.  When I got my Kindle, I loved it!  I could embiggen the font, carry lots of books around in a small package and those longer, heavier books were now easy to read.  Negative:  Costly, Amazon store on Kindle is awful.

Then for my birthday I received the iPad2.  (Cue chorus!)  At first I was worried that the backlit screen would strain my eyes which would have me running back to the Kindle.  After reading a good portion of this very long book night after night, I have to say that my fears were unfounded.  The Sepia option, easy contrast adjustment and multitude of fonts and sizes have made it easy to be comfortable reading on the iPad.  In fact, I like the iBooks app better than the Kindle app.  I think it could use some improvements (I have a tendency to accidentally flip forward several pages every now and again), but overall, it's quite nice.

Speaking of reading, I also finished Ape House by Sara Gruen which was pretty good, but nothig to get excited about.

SInce I've already blathered on for quite a while here, I'll leave the knitting and quilting for another day.

Comments

[Donna]

I also recently received an ipad2 as a present. I like the ibook reader more than I thought I would & I too use the Sepia & dim the screen to about a third maximum brightness. I still prefer reading a paper book but I am hooked on "cozies" & like to read them in order. I recently discovered a new series & found the first one at the local BN shortly before the 3rd in the series came out. Now BN has the first & third but not the 2nd one. Nor does Border's have the 2nd one. So I ordered it from ibooks. What I especially love ibooks for is storing knitting patterns in PDF form. With both my girls now living far away, I travel a lot (at least 5-6 times a year). So eliminating some of the weight & the risk of loss of a photocopied pattern is really great.