Janne de Hoop
When moving to Delft I had to decorate a new room. At first I thought this would be a chance to have a room which was not completely filled with stuff, but after living there for a couple of years (and being less at my parents house) I started to miss some stuff that I always kept in my parents house. In my fourth year in Delft I moved all my books including the shelves they were on to Delft. I finally had all the books that I have been collecting all my life in my room. I know from all my books when I got them and from who I got them. Most books I have I read at least 2 times and all the books I didn’t read more often I probably lend from the library. I love the smell of books, I recognise some books by their smell and I love the feeling of books, you feel when you are reading at what part of the book you are, did you just start of are you noticing that the book is almost finished but there is still a lot to be solved. At night I like to read in bed and I managed to do that in a way that my books don’t damage, but it works best with books from over 500 pages, smaller books are harder to handle strangely enough, since they cannot properly stand on their sides.
Two years ago I got an ereader for my birthday from my parents. They both new of my love of books, of course, but were convinced of the advantages of an ereader. My father asked curiously what I thought of having an ereader and to be honest I still don’t know for sure.
When going on holidays I always brought a big stack of books with me and when I finished them I started with the books the rest of the family brought with them. But since I have my ereader I can just take it with me and I can have all the books of the world. It saves a lot of weight and of course it saves a lot of paper since the books don’t have to be printed. I don’t know how it works out if you put the energy for books next to the energy an ereader uses, but I do know that it is not using a lot of energy, since I have only had to reload it once in the past year.
When I just got it, it was immediately full of books. Books I didn’t know before and also books I wasn’t necessarily going to read; ‘it is very easy, you can just choose from your library’ as my mother said. But to me that was immediately the problem. There were so many books that I didn’t know where to choose from and I couldn't read the back of the books, since that wasn’t on the ebook files. I have been struggling with it for almost a year, not knowing what to read and what it all was. Until last summer, before going on the holidays I emptied my complete ereader and only put the books on there that I wanted to read and knew of beforehand. This was for me the point were I got rid of the biggest downside of the ereader. It even got better when I found out that the fantasy ebooks are really cheap on bol.com. So I finally thought to be convinced of the ereader. I could look up a new series or writer on the internet and start reading almost immediately. And at the same time I would be saving paper and also room in my house.
But this Sinterklaas I received a real book again… With a nice extra cover and a beautiful red textile cover underneath with golden writing on there and I really love reading it…