For all my griping about how ebooks just don’t match up to paper ones in my books (ha, ha), there’s one aspect I don’t think I’ve fully realized until more recently. And that’s their size. Or rather, the fact that outside of a number on the bottom of the screen telling you how many pages a particular book has and/or how long it thinks it’s going to take you to read said book, there is absolutely nothing differentiating a tiny little novella from some behemoth that has designs on all your free time for the next two weeks.
Now, I grant you, this has its perks. For one thing, if you’re the sort of person who might balk at some eight hundred plus page epic, if you don’t happen to notice just how long it is until you’ve been well and truly hooked, you might end up reading something wonderful that you otherwise would have assumed you didn’t have time for. That being said, if you’re the sort of person who is usually reading several books all at the same time, and you happen to pick up an ebook copy of some brick of a high fantasy novel that you assumed was something like four or five hundred pages long and is, instead, twice that length, you might have to adjust your schedule or accept that your library loan is going to run out before you finish.
At least with a paper book you’ll know what you’re getting into.
Now, don’t mind me, I have to go read another couple chapters of The Priory of the Orange Tree.
F.A. Hakimian 