Talk:Essays/@comment-4423292-20170527192344

Some reasons why I love reading on my phone
I started reading on my phone when I was going on a trip, and didn't really have the room to bring a paper book with me. I really go into reading on my phone in the summer of 2016, when I was reading the Kencyrath in Paraguay.

Reading on your phone is a great way to read in the dark. You don't have to worry about a light, because your phone provides it's own light. It also provides just enough light. When you're about to fall asleep, a full-on reading lamp can be too bright. I like to use the black-background-and-white-text phone setting, which is perfect. And when you're done, you don't have to get up and turn off the light: you can just stick it under your pillow.

I love reading on my phone because it's small. When you're reading a paper book when you're tired, there's always the issue of physically holding the book when you're too tired to do so, but want to keep reading. Unless you're in the very middle of the story, one side's bigger and heavier than the other. And you always want the page you're reading to be the one reading against the bed, because that's the best angle for lighting—plus, the other side, held up by your tired hand, shakes, making it hard to read. So you start our laying on whichever side allows the heavier side of the book to rest against the bed. All well and good... until you finish that page. And then you're faced with the dilemma of having to either hold the heavy side way up, to create a good angle to read, or having to role over to your other side, and repeat this rolling every page.

On a phone, you don't have any of this. A phone is small, and light, and you don't have the bilateral book thing so you can always rest it against the bed.

In an ebook, you can highlight text, write notes, and dog-ear pages, and then delete it when you're done. I hate writing in, or dog-earring, actual books because I feel like I'm defiling them. (And yeah, you can use bookmarks instead of dog-ears, but once you've got several then they start falling out if you're not careful, and it's just kind of a mess.) But in a ebook, you can delete your notes later when you're done with the, so there's no harm done.

And you can search for words, or names, or quotes. And you can copy those quotes if you want, rather than transcribing them by hand, enduring monotony and risking errors.

And because it's on your phone, your books are with you basically all the time. You can carry them with you wherever, and it doesn't take extra weight or space. You can read them wherever you have a moment. And for me... I like having them with me, even if don't read them. Just knowing I have them with me can be comforting.