Chicago has had an incredibly mild winter this year. But if you’re like me you probably start thinking about hibernating when the temperatures dip below freezing. Winter for some is a time for skiing and sledding. For me, it’s time to do crafts and to curl up with a good book.
You can find countless hours of entertainment and even the equivalent of an advanced degree at your public library if you don’t mind getting out from time to time to exchange reading materials. That’s good, of course. However, now we have a wealth of reading materials at our fingertips and available right in our own homes. The internet has a number of outstanding libraries. Some of my favorites include:
- http://www.gutenberg.org/
- http://books.google.com/
- http://openlibrary.org/
- http://archive.org/index.php
And, of course, if you have a Kindle you can find countless free books at Amazon.
It’s really quite a change for us seniors to be able to read on a computer. There are definite advantages, what with the ability to adjust the size of the fonts to accommodate our aging eyes. And, there’s definitely a much different feel to reading on a screen – whether it be a kindle or a computer screen. I particularly appreciate the ability to pick up a book and start reading exactly where I left off (even when I don’t remember to bookmark the page). More than that I find learning much easier when I can simply let my computer find what I’m looking for.
I still love old fashioned books. The look and feel of a book in my hands is comforting. I am one of those who enjoyed having a library of books on a bookshelf to admire. But I find that those old loved books don’t get much use after all. Once they were read and put on a shelf, I rarely went back to read them a second or third time. I now wonder what the sense was to having them sit there gathering dust. The more comfortable I get with my laptop and kindle, the more I enjoy the luxury of reading whatever my heart desires without leaving the comfort of home and without hunting for the passages buried in one of those books somewhere – if only I could spend the time hunting for it..
Whether you prefer the look and feel of a physical book, or you are adapting to the new digital books…
Whether you’re interested in pure entertainment or in acquiring uncommon wealth of educational materials…
Winter in the digital age is a great time for those of us who don’t cotton to the cold.