Kindle

About five minutes after I posted that I had no use for electronic books, it was Christmas morning and my brother gifted me with a Kindle. I took it with me to San Antonio and here are some early thoughts:

First. $9.99 is more than I pay for books. Generally, I pay a dollar for a book. Browsing on Amazon, I found Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days. This has been on my wish list for a couple of years and since I had not seen it in my usual Used Book haunts, I downloaded it.

Then I discovered that if a book is out of copyright, it can be had for pennies. Specifically, I bought the complete works of Shakespeare for 99 cents. My mother called that a waste of digital space – as if I am really going to read sonnets on the airplane. I might. And anyway: it’s cool.
There were a few books that can be downloaded from Amazon free of charge. So I picked two that sounded vaguely interesting and went for it. My bargain method is to search for “Kindle Books” and sort by price from lowest to highest.

Oh, but you wanted to hear about actually using the Kindle.

My friend, Brandon, is a gadgety-tech sort of guy and he wrote a detailed review that does a far better job than I could. You can read it here. Following is my whiny, non-technical analysis:

Pro:

It can lay flat on the table. So when I am at lunch I do not need to keep a hand free to hold it up.

Con:

The device costs a fortune. Am I really going to carry it around to lunch? At my meeting last week, where I tend to leave my bag lying around rooms in the convention center, I was afraid to take it out of the hotel room.

Pro:

You can always download a book on the fly. Very convenient if I am stuck in an airport all day.

Con:

Lack of page numbers. And no good way to know how close you are to the end of a chapter. And the clock isn’t where I want it to be.

Pro:

The pages are easy enough on the eyes. Turning pages is easy, although the “Back” and “Previous Page” buttons messed me up.

Con:

There is some lag time between screens. But I became pretty adept at hitting the “Next” button with a couple of lines to go so that the page turned in sync with my brain.

Overall, this is a nice toy. But I am not giving up my used books.