My thoughts on PC Reading

Hello everyone this is your pal Coldguy and wanted to go and say that yes we are still looking for people to welcome this happy site with numerous written, video, audio book reviews feel free to send me a message with your work to get the ball rolling.

Now I wanted to talk about something interesting today and that is reading on the PC.  I have stated that I plan on getting a Kindle in the near future I am just waiting for the funds to be available or a good sale hits the device before swinging it up.  However since I like to read in advance for podcast I needed to go and pick up a book to read, one of the titles that looked interesting was available for the kindle, cost half the price, and would ship to me 2 weeks faster then if I received a physical copy.  So I took the plunge and decided to read this book off of my computer.

First off the program overall is a nice program, the kindle on PC does the job of reading books very well and does not add much fluff into the fold.  Your opening screen requires you to sign into amazon for obvious reason, and then you are on a blue screen with book covers.  You are given 3 free books (hurray) all of which have been free on the public domain (boo).  The titles are Aesop's Fables, Pride and Prejudice (with no zombies), and Treasure Island.  If you have not read them before at least 2 of them are going to be enjoyable to glance at.

Next you goal is to go and select the cover of the book you want to pick up, once done then poof book opens and you are reading it.  Now a nice feature is that the font adjusts to the size of the program, so if you are multitasking you can have it to the side of the window and glance at the book as you use your computer or simply have it take the full screen and have it large enough for the person behind you to go and read it as well.  You can either use the arrow keys to move pages or the mouse, it also auto saves your last position on the book in case you need to come back to the program and the images are nice enough to stand out and capture what it was meant to do on paper.

Now the only major issue I have with this program is...the color of the paper.  Sounds trivial I know however it caused my eyes to go insane when attempt a long term reading session.  The color is white, as white as the text box you are reading in right now.  Now here is the thing with white, yes it does provide a nice contrasting color, but it also requires the majority of eye muscles to actually look at it (black being the total opposite).  When you read a book the paper is not white, it is an off white color that uses less strain in your eyes to read the text.

Now when reading something online that is short you are not going to get a strain since you are moving on to another article, story, or website.  You are not going to experience the pain I felt when reading for an hour in front of a computer screen, so my suggestion have a variety of font and paper colors and allow us to change it to something that the reader enjoys.

Now the biggest issue is simply, you are on a computer reading.  The back-lit screen is not paper and the amount that you can read is going to slow down as well.  A book that would normally take me an afternoon or two took me a week and a half to complete.  It was not the fault of the book but the fault of the presentation of the book.  I work 8 hours a day in front of a computer monitor so your mileage may very but went I need to concentrate on reading I like to be away from a lit screen and distractions that could take me away from me reading the book itself.

Often times I would get an email, a direct message, or a notification for me to check something else on the computer that would pull me away from the story and would often go and distract me from the actual book I was trying to read.  Which is why I think ultimately reading a book on a computer or a cell phone is nice but not ideal.  There is too much to pull you out of the story that unless it grips you closely by it will be very hard to keep yourself focused.