I was sure paper books were better until my book club went digital for 3 months

My book club in Austin has been meeting for 6 years and we always used physical copies. I was the LOUDEST voice against e-readers, saying you lose the feel and the experience. Then last spring, half the group couldn't get the library holds in time for our monthly meetup. So we all grabbed the Kindle version of The Nickel Boys on a Tuesday and read it in two weeks. I honestly expected to hate it but I finished the book faster than usual thanks to the built-in dictionary and highlighting. The real shocker was our discussion though. Everyone had marked the same passages and we dug into them way deeper than we ever did with paper. Has anyone else switched formats temporarily and found something they didn't expect?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan_bailey9316d ago

but man I still can't focus on a screen the way I do with ink on paper...

mark_mitchell29d ago

Jumped into digital after swearing I'd never touch one, and honestly I felt like a traitor at first. Tbh, the only thing I missed was sniffing the pages and pretending I looked smart on the bus. But then I accidentally highlighted an entire chapter just by brushing the screen with my thumb and realized I'd never annotated that much with a real book unless I was pissed at the author. Ngl, my book club actually finished a book on time for once, which is more than I can say for our paper days when half the group showed up having only read the first two chapters.

wells.karen29d ago

My book club did the same thing last fall with Demon Copperhead. I was dead set against it but the hold list at the library was 8 weeks long. The highlighting feature totally changed how I read - I ended up marking way more than I ever would with a highlighter in a paper book.