This week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt asks “When you travel, how many books do you bring with you? Has this changed since the arrival of e-books?”
How many books I pack for trips depends on how long I plan to be gone. I usually just take one because I don’t often find time to read on vacations when I take them. However, I took my Kindle on my most recent trip to Salem. I took no other books. My travel reading packing has definitely changed since ebooks. For one thing, I was able to download Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables the day I visited the actual house. In fact, if I had taken my Kindle with me to visit the House of Seven Gables itself, I could have downloaded the book at the actual site and might have begun reading it in the beautiful gardens next to the house. I might not pack actual books for trips ever again. My Kindle is much lighter, and packing it instead means I can actually take more books than I otherwise would be able to take. Also, if I decide on a whim to read something else, I can download a new book in about a minute. Can’t beat it.
I found some bookish news you might be interested in. Related to e-books and travel is Attributor’s finding that e-book piracy is on the rise. Probably not a huge surprise to folks with e-readers. For the record, all my books are either free titles or legally purchased books (in case you were wondering). I think maybe Kindle’s closed format (not allowing ePub formats, for example) probably prevents piracy, but you can still load them with PDF’s, provided the books have been made available in that format.
LitWorld wants to help one million children learn to read by 2014. You can help! In related news, WorldReader.org and Amazon are working together to digitize African books and provide access to e-books by African readers and e-readers for students in Ghana. Nice to see folks pitching in to increase literacy and also to help make reading easier and more accessible.
I take ridiculous numbers of books on vacation with me, basically as many as I can put in my suitcase without exceeding weight requirements. The only exception is if I'm going somewhere with lots of bookshops.
Do you find you're able to read a lot? I don't know if it's just that my kids are little and our vacations don't seem to have much down time, or if it's me, but I just don't read much on vacation.
I think the single greatest reason to have an e-reader is the flexibility and portability it gives you when traveling. (That was my selling point for my husband.) The danger is the ability to impulsively download a book … I have to be careful with that!
I totally agree. It's easy to forget you're actually spending money on the books! I also like highlighting and annotating. I tend not to do that with the fiction I read, but I do it more on my Kindle.
I loved my Kindle for traveling. I just got back from 3 week in Italy and unfortunately my Kindle fell prey to some light-fingered idiot in Rome. My only consolation is that it's no good to the thief – I've notified Amazon it was lost/stolen and I have the battery charger. Now, the big question. Do I replace it or get an iPad?
Does the warranty cover that kind of thing? I know I broke my screen, and they replaced it no questions asked, but I'm not sure about theft. In any case, I don't know what I'd do without mine. I hope you can get a replacement, whether it's a Kindle or iPad. If you think you need the additional computing and don't need to read in the sunlight, you might want to go for the iPad.