Another of those HDR shots from the Sydney Tower. The views are definitely worth the $25 admission price. Pressed the camera all the way up against the window to reduce the reflections as possible. One of those tricks I learned reading photography websites.

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Just got my shipment of books from Amazon UK. Heh, they are part of the reason why the two large book companies in Australia went into administration recently as it’s cheaper to import books (free shipping! yay!) than it is to buy them locally, even after discounts.

I bought an iPad thinking I’d use it a lot for reading eBooks and PDFs related to photography. I do, but there are some drawbacks to that. The iPad is a multifunction device, and there are times when you are reading and you feel the urge to check something out. You switch to the browser app and there you lose your train of thought. With a book, it has one function, and that is to engage you in its contents. It sits there on the side on a table, and you’d instinctively pick it up to continue reading, with the iPad, you get lost in all its functions and then you forget about the book you were reading. There have been times where I got lost on which page I was on (friends flicking through your book collection, or just falling asleep and accidentally swiping to another page).

With books, the spine of the book to how it was opened is sort of like a memory of the last page you were on, so even if you lose your bookmark, you can sort of flick back to the page you were on. The thickness of the book also gives you an idea on how long it’d take to read a book, which part you are in, and whether you only have a few pages left to read before the book ends. With iPad or Kindle books, sure they have the page numbers at the bottom, but I still haven’t figured out what they mean as my experience with physical books is about 50 pages an hour so you know how long you have before you put it down. Having physical pages also allows you to scan multiple sections of the book in a glance, something I can’t do on a reading device. There is also the action of just flipping through the pages and skimming the content just to see what you’ll be looking at (for books with photos that is).

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Having written about reading, I’d just like to say I am grateful to mom for encouraging me to read from a young age. She and my aunt used to read to me the occasional bedtime story. I liked the picture books from kindergarten and was lucky to have access to the entire section of Enid Blyton’s books while in primary school. I’m sure I read almost the whole selection of the 96 books stored in the classroom’s cupboard. Mom got me a card for the local library and from reading to me, I slowly got the confidence to read through the books myself, and was pretty proud of myself when I finished my first 300+ page book on my own.

Heh, these days it’s being pragmatic vs idealistic. I’d like a wall covered with books but then I worry about all the space that would take up, the moving, the costs of shelving, the books themselves etc. Well, I guess I will continue to buy books and keep those that I really treasure.