Aye, Book

A first for me with this. I read a book all the way through. From pixellated cover to pixellated cover.

I'd downloaded a couple of eBook readers over the summer and played around with some of the free ebooks around, but I really only dipped into them. Then I came across a book I'd been meaning to read for a while - Alistair Urquhart's The Forgotten Highlander and I downloaded it (even though it was £3 dearer than the paperback version).

Maybe because it's such an unbelievable true story (and I do mean utterly unbelievable) but I found myself totally hooked in and unrestrained by the digital switch-over. Being able to bookmark pages easily and having the software remember exactly where it was you left was really handy too, and the extra features, such as being able to highlight words and instantly have a google or wikipedia search appear for it, really enhanced the experience. In fact, I felt more comfortable reading on the smaller iPhone screen than when I swapped over to the MacBook (the Kindle application automatically syncs your page position and bookmarks across any device you have it installed on) as scanning across the bigger screen felt more of a strain. Now that the iPhone can do multi-tasking it was also good to be able to have a bit of music to immerse in as I read (Spotify works in the background as well as the iPod).

Overall I found it a less arduous experience than I'd initially expected, and I've now downloaded another book to get started on this evening.

If you haven't had a go, try it, you might just like it. And if you haven't read The Forgotten Highlander get your hands on it in whatever format you can, it's an absolutely fascinating and terrifying read.