You love to hold a real book, in your hands, I feel for you because I do to. There is something about the pages, smell of the printed word, the handwritten notes that you made squeeze into the margins and highlights that bleed through to the next page……Ah they are great.

But I’m a Kindle fanatic. Going digital was a little tough for me and making the switch might be tough for you too. I’ve come up with a few tips that may sway you to the digital side.

Once you embrace digital books, the benefits with far outweigh your nostalgia for the printed word. 

Amazon is advertising over 700,000 books with the kindle unlimited. In the palm of our hands we have the ability to carry around hundreds of books on the Kindle app. It’s just amazing.

Here’s a few things that make the kindle app so amazing and why I switched:

Highlighting in the App: I developed an easy to use code for scanning though my highlights.

• Pink – Action Items. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod if a perfect example of a time that I used the pink highlighter. I wanted to  make my own version of TMM. I highlighted items I wanted to work and placed them into my productivity system to take some action on. I had cereal projects, next actions and reference items when I was working on my own TMM.
• Blue – Quotes. I love quotes and spreading great quotes. I can easily scan for cool quotes when I need one.
• Yellow – Reference. These are just good points to know from the book. Sometimes I clip them into Evernote with the web clipper.

Email: I love that you can email PDF’s s to the kindle. This is a great place to store them. Since I use the kindle as my primary reading app having books stored here is great.

Organize your collections: I have all my books organized into these collections:

• To Read: If someone recommends a book I usually just buy it and store in this collection. If someone took the time to recommend it and if I respect that person I just buy the book and store it here.
• Currently Reading: Sometimes I read a few books at a time. If something peeks my interest or is more relevant to what’s happening now in my life I might switch. I do try to get back to the books I left but sometimes if they weren’t good enough to keep my attention in the first place why bother.
• Maybe Read: These are books I don’t want to read right now. One day I might want to (fill in the blank) books go here.
• Read: This is my archive. I move all my read books to this collection.

You can log into the Kindle.Amazon website to see all the notes and highlights from your books. What a great feature to be able to look up from your desktop your quotes and notes.

With all this great technology Some books just don’t translate well to the digital format. For instance Art & Architecture books aren’t well suited for Kindle. Anything with high quality photos aren’t well suited for the Kindle app.

Workbooks are very problematic on the Kindle. I find it’s best to keep a journal handy to fill out the questions from the workbook. I would love for a PDF of the questions to be available after you download the book. Maybe someday….

Have you tried using  the Kindle App let me know on Twitter.