Nooks without Crannies

This is why I finally broke down and bought a Nook:  I have arthritis and I am planning my big two-week vacation.


Let me explain.


I love books.  Not just reading, but books.  Not electronic screens with words on them -- BOOKS.  I love the feel of holding them, of turning the pages, of checking out the size of the print as well as the number of pages.  There would be absolutely no reason for me to cave and submit to the economic tsunami of profit that is being raked in by producers of electronic media.  Green be damned; the people who are selling you eBooks as the green alternative are making buckets of money by selling at top dollar items that it costs virtually nothing to sell virtually.


But now that I am retired, and since I have finally admitted to being arthritic, I noticed that my fingers and hands were aching and that holding a book for several hours was either causing or making it worse.


Then there is the issue of traveling lighter.  I will not leave my house without a book; I will not go on vacation without several times the number of books I could ever devour during my allotted vacation time -- just in case.  But when I take the train I am a comically old person barely lugging around baggage and bags, and there is also the real stress on various body parts like shoulders and knees that I really need to be careful about.


I have done things like collect over the year the rattiest paperbacks -- destined for the recycle bin even by someone who never throws away books willingly -- with titles that are on my interminable "to read" list, just so that I could tear out pages as I read them.  This helps to some extent, but there are so many more books that I would not throw away but that I must have with me when I go away.


So I decided to get an eReader.  I spent a day researching and reflecting on my research, and chose a Nook over a Kindle ONLY BECAUSE AMAZON CHARGES $40 MORE TO GET A KINDLE THAT DOESN'T STREAM ADVERTISING -- ARE YOU LISTENING, AMAZON???


When my Nook came, I eagerly went to the library's electronic resources catalog and found, out of about 50 titles I searched, only two.  And of those, only one was actually available.


So I downloaded it and "read" it.  It really doesn't feel like really reading, but I figure eventually I'll get used to the "faux" feeling of it.  It had some neat features like bookmarking.  You can set the size of the type, which I tried, but I just couldn't see reading "pages" that had a paragraph per.


What you can't do with a Nook is touch the page, not unless you want it to do something.  Like I said, I am a physical type of reader.  At times, if my eyes are getting tired, I will run my finger down the page as I read.  I also have these wonderful bookmarks called "Last Line" that is sadly no longer in business, but that you can stick in the page exactly where you stopped reading.  Can't do it.


The other thing I do is keep a slip of paper in the book, not to mark the page, but to jot down notes, about the book, about things I need to remember to do, about ideas for my blogs.  Sure, you can take notes somehow on your Nook, but you can't stick it on your refrigerator, can you?


Then there's the borrowing part, because I've been a library devotee my whole life, and the only time I will actually buy a book is if I've already read it and liked it so much I want it on my bookshelf.  Libraries are the best thing we have in this country, and libraries are free, so if I won't buy a book actually made of stuff, I am certainly not going to buy a book made out of nothing.


But as of now, even the best libraries don't have enough eBooks, and they are contracted so that only a certain number of them can be "checked out" at a time, and there are interminable hold lists.  AND they check out for up to 21 days.  Period.  No renewals.  No overdues.  If you haven't finished that very last chapter, too bad.  It just electronically locks itself up, which I think is just about inhumane and definitely immoral.


So there I was, storing library books on my Nook to take with me on vacation mid-July.  If you "check-out" an audio book, and put it on your iPod, and don't put it anywhere near your computer, the book doesn't go away.  But they have apparently perfected the technology of locking up an eBook after the due date while it's right on your Nook, wi-fi off, and nowhere near your computer.


Can't beat that kind of technological advance, can you?


So now I have a half dozen eBooks on my Nook that I can't read.


And even if I could, I couldn't run my finger down the page to keep my place.