Books on a Tablet

One of the useful things that I have found I can do with my tablet is reading books.  Since getting a tablet last year I've started reading a lot more.  Most of the books I've chosen to read are old books because the old books are free!  I've read Treasure Island, Guliver's Travels, Dracula, and now Moby Dick.
     Yes, I know that books are free at the library too, but I read slow and don't devote much time to it, so checking out a library book isn't ideal most of the time.

Once I started reading on the tablet I had to find an app to use for this purpose.  There are a lot of options when it comes to this.  I started out using Google's own book app.  It has a fancy page turning animation that does a good job acting like paper as you slide your thumb across the page.  But the Google apps still felt like it was missing something.
     As I kept reading, I tried the Kindle app.  I'll tell you right now, this is the winner.  Kindle doesn't give you fancy page turning animation, but it offers so much more.  Some of my favorite features are the ability to highlight text, make notes and bookmarks (and quickly get back to those places), quickly change the brightness of the page (2 finger swipe up or down), and a built in dictionary.  Some of these older books I'm reading use vocabulary that I've never heard of.  If I hold my finger down on the word, a short definition comes up on the bottom of the page.  It never takes me away from my page and I keep going.  If you need more information, touching the small definition will take you to the dictionary page.  There are a lot of other cool features in the Kindle app that I haven't seen in other readers, so I'll be sticking with it and the Amazon online book store.
     I wasn't sure about reading books on a screen.  I didn't think I would like it, but now that I've been doing it for a while, I like it a lot.  It's easy to carry multiple books with me or quickly reference back a note I made. Being able to adjust the screen brightness has been helpful.  I've never felt that the reading on a screen was uncomfortable.  A bonus of reading on a tablet is that when I am connected to wifi, I can quickly jump out of the reading app and switch to Wikipedia or Google to get more information on a topic, and then back to the book.
    Some people complain that they prefer holding a book and feeling the pages.  I think there is something to that, but I also wonder how many of the people saying that have really given reading an electronic book a chance?  I still read paper books too and there is good things to each.  Before you decide that e-readers are not for you, I encourage you to try it out.
     I've really enjoyed going back and reading these old books on my tablet.  I'm also glad that the tablet hasn't just become a big screen for Angry Birds marathons.