My Book is Better Than Your Kindle

I love technology, and new devices. My iPad is clutch at home, and my iPhone fills in the same gap when I'm on the go. Pandora, Words With Friends, FourSquare...they are all in my daily life. And as I got my book club book that I ordered off of Amazon in the mail, and swore very loud as I realized I bought the large print edition, I paused to think about why, WHY?? don't I have a Kindle.

But I still cannot get excited about an e-reader. A book is meant to be held. The pages turned. Not a cold hard piece of plastic that you have to plug in. I am the only person in my book club that has yet to convert to an e-reader. And even with my large-print edition book, I will not convert.

And believe me I have tried. I tried to read a book on my iPad and it sucked. I hated it. I hated the book. It took me forever to finish it which made me hate it even more. And I KNOW for a fact that people are going to vehemently disagree with me, so here it is----why my book is better than your Kindle:

• You can't share your kindle with friends. Okay, maybe you are super generous and don't really like to read that much and are willing to part with your reading 'device' while your friend reads the book that you downloaded. But I LOVE to read a book and pass it on.
• Sometimes you need a change of scenery. I stare at some form of screen all day long. Whether its a computer at work, TV on my couch or my phone/iPad any other moment of the day, sometimes you just need a break. I love my screens and don't want to give any of them up, I just don't need to add another one.
• I don't want to have to do math when I read. I hear people talking about percent of book complete, some math conversion to the number of kindle pages to regular pages, blah blah blah and all I can think of is "there shouldn't be math in reading". That is why I like reading--no math.
• It's harder to judge a book by its cover on the Kindle. I know you are supposed to do it, but I love picking a book by its cover. It's wrong. It probably makes me a bad person. But I don't care. I do it anyway. 
• It's harder to spy on what other people are reading. I love being on the beach, or in the airport, where a ton of people are reading books and seeing what everyone is reading. It is impossible to do this when everyone is just starting at a screen.
• Without books places like http://www.open-books.org/ couldn't exist. Or Better World Books. Or even local libraries that get a lot of funding from selling used books. And while I am on it, you can't buy best selling, recent books for $1.00 from the library sale on the Kindle. You have to buy full-priced books.

So agree or agree to disagree but I am a book lover for life. I will continue schlepping 4 books on vacation and shed them along the way. I will still buy used books. I will still buy new books, and if they happen to come in large-print I will read them anyway.

Because they have pages that can be dog-eared. Pages that can be turned. And flipped through. And passed along.