Retraining My Brain to Read a Book, Not a Kindle

Earlier this week I read a “real” book for the first time since I got my Kindle last year.  It was interesting to see how much my brain had retrained itself to the Kindle:

• The biggest surprise? For the first few hours I found my thumb reaching for a phantom joystick that wasn’t there anytime I saw a word I wanted to define.  I didn’t realize until then how much I’ve come to rely on having a dictionary at my fingertips.
• The biggest frustration? Not being able to highlight passages of interest and store them into a central repository.  I know –  people have underlined books for centuries, but it seemed so much more inefficient to me than having all my highlights from all my books in one place.  I settled for dog-earing those pages even though I knew it was unlikely I would go back and transcribe the sections that were of interest.
• What I enjoyed the most? Being able to quickly browse forward again to see how many pages were left until a chapter wrapped up.  I have always wished the Kindle would add some sort of “how much is left in this chapter / section” feature.
• The second biggest surprise? I have really gotten used to holding the smaller form factor of the Kindle.  I write this next sentence knowing it sounds totally ridiculous, but it took me an hour or two to get re-acclimated to holding a two-paned book that continually pushed against my fingers to remind me that it would be much happier if I just let it return to its natural closed state.
• A final random thought? Quickly thumbing back to pages I’d previously read to find the first reference to a person, thought, or concept wasn’t materially better or worse for me than the Kindle search.  I could have argued both sides of that one, but it’s really a tie.

It surprised me to see how after only about six months, the Kindle has changed my perspective on something I’ve been doing for virtually my entire life.  My internal frame of reference for long-form reading is now the Kindle, not a physical book.  Crazy.

Tagged as: ebook, kindle