People know me as a big reader and writer. My friends, my family. So I’ve been asked a number of times what I think about this whole “eBook thing.” The sudden trend toward Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers, iPads, etc, for the purpose of reading books and other media. Which would I recommend (because I must know!), which is better? (I don’t know!) What do I, as a huge consumer of the written word, like or not like about them? (Many things, good and bad, from a distant perspective.) Would I ever consider self-publishing directly to eBook? (No.) But had I ever actually sat and read a book on an eReader? (Nope.)

Well. Not until yesterday.

Yesterday I was on the L train, where the ambient subway noise is so loud under the East River that I usually have to pause or turn up my audiobook or music in my headphones. But brilliantly, I forgot my headphones yesterday. Neither did I remember to bring my stalwart mass market emergency paperback (usually something I’ve already read) in its little fabric protective cover (for both subway privacy — I can’t stand people being nosy! — and for protection in my backpack). So I was without a way to amuse myself for my commute. My commute isn’t an “easy” one, either: it’s 10 minutes on the L, 5-10 minutes of waiting at the next platform, then 10-15 minutes on the ancient, creaking, and loud C train. Meaning, I can’t snuggle into a plastic seat and read for a good forty minutes. It’s all starts and stops. Half of the time when I am listening to an audiobook, I have to have it paused for at least half if not more of the commute simply because the extra noise is too deafening. (But I never “read” an audiobook for the first time, I always read it first, then listen to it if I can get it from the library or online, to read it again.) Not only are the subways themselves loud, but the platforms are loud (every time any train, even the ones going in the other direction across the way, pulls into the station, it’s all screeches and creaks). So I end up either not hearing half the book or getting annoyed that I have no distraction. Thus, reading is usually my preferred distraction. I can still hear when a train is coming without actually having to stop what I’m doing. I prefer reading during the brief stretches of inactivity throughout the day, too. When I’m on the bus, or when I’m sitting on a park bench, I enjoy being able to pull out a book and dig right in.

Getting back to the point, I pulled out my iPhone while on the L. I browsed through my apps, thinking maybe I’d play a game. Then I realized I had downloaded the Barnes & Noble eReader app because I’d gotten a bunch of free downloads the other day from their website. I started playing with it and opened up Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper, which I also own in hardcover but haven’t gotten around to yet. I tweaked the font, size, and page animation, then got to reading. The L stopped, I locked the iPhone and shoved it in my pocket, darted between slow folks up the stairs, then settled on the C platform to wait. I pulled out the iPhone again, and I was still on that same page in the eBook. I kept reading. I read as I walked. I read as I waited later in the day. I sat on a bench in the sunshine in Central Park idly watching the small children play as I continued to read. When someone required my attention — lock. iPhone in the pocket. “Yes?” Done, I pulled it out again, and kept reading. I read a good third of the book across the course of the day. (Helped in part by my ability to simply lock the iPhone and throw it in my pocket when I needed to pay attention to the real world.)

I was so impressed.

I’ve disliked the idea of eBooks from the start because I am one of those people who loves getting ink on my fingers when I tear through a brand new paperback the day of its release. (I get ink on my thumbs and left pinky, from the way I alternately hold it with my left hand or with both hands.) I love seeing my bookshelves lined with colorful spines of much-read books. I love seeing that I have a complete series on my shelf, next to other series. I love the idea of being able to thumb through the pages and find that quick-reference scene or sentence I was trying to quote from one of my dog-eared favorites. I geeked out when I went to a rare book room and got to touch an original version of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, in the compiled serialized format of its first publication. (I don’t even like Dickens and I was geeking out!) I’ve held a page of the Gutenberg Bible printed hundreds of years ago! (GEEK OUT.) I am a book person!

But yesterday was the first time I could see myself, say, reading an eBook on the iPad and loving it. Or simply reading more eBooks on my iPhone — though admittedly it’s a small screen with terrible battery life economy! I found, despite my love of the feel of pages in my hand, that I really enjoyed the idea of a book on the go. Even more on the go than a book by definition already is. Scary, that.

It felt, oddly, as I felt when I first transitioned to an .mp3 player, when music used to be about having that collection of discs in that folder and carrying that with your CD player, or remembering to throw the right disc into the CD player before going to the gym or the track. How many times did I open my CD player to find I’d remembered the wrong CD! That’s… obsolete now. It’s all loaded on my iPod, my iPhone. If I forgot to update it lately, that’s terrible, but I don’t have the choice of 13 tracks, I have thousands. But I think about the way that music’s shift to digital has changed my life and I try to transpose that to books… books… ah! But see, I don’t want books to go the way of diskettes and vinyl. I don’t want to see magazines and newspapers become entirely digitized. One of my friends, an iPad user, showed me the Wall Street Journal’s iPad app. Embedded videos! Searchable keywords! It makes getting the paper version delivered somewhat silly. But I think: as a teenager I ripped pictures of hot guys out of magazines and taped them to my walls. Will my children copy-and-paste them to their laptop desktops — to their touch-screen digital crazy devices? I see digital photo frames in homes, with scrolling slideshows of family vacations, and wonder where photo albums and scrapbooks have gone. No doubt the digital age has made information safer and more easily accessible — no running into a burning house to save the photos when there are backups stored online — but it’s not… tangible. Not in the same way. That was and still is my big question mark about eBooks. How will it change the way we read, the way we consume books and other media?

Two days ago I could have said I’d never read an eBook and I wasn’t certain I’d like the experience if I tried. Today I can say that while I did pick up the hardcover version of Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper (which is excellent so far) when I was home and able to pull it off the shelf, I am planning to read more of it today digitally. This experience has made me curious about eReaders in a way I haven’t been until now. I could have cared less, but now I’m thinking about it. Seriously. Ah! Someone pinch me.