After rediscovering my love of reading, I've spent the last couple of months reading everything I could get my hands on: Travels with Charley, Cannery Row, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Into the Wild, The Sun Also Rises, and other stuff. Just before Thanksgiving I did something that was out of character for me, rather than spend the proceeds from the recent sale of a bike on just more bike stuff, I bought an Amazon Kindle. My Kindle arrived the day before Thanksgiving. My wife, a Luddite when it's convenient for her, went on about the virtues of a book. I in turn attempted to impress her by propping my Kindle against a pillow on my stomach while holding a tortilla chip in one hand and a plate of queso dip in the other. A light tap with a pinkie is all that was needed to flip to the next page. You cant do that with a book. She wasn't impressed. So far I've read The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo (I heard about it from Meli) and one of Amazon's free classics-Sailing Alone Around the World. I'm liking the Kindle.
One battery charge will give you close to a month's worth of usage. It holds about 3,500 books. Most literary classics printed before 1923 are free.
One of the features I really appreciate is the ability to increase font size and sentence spacing. I like the print to be a little on the large size so I don't have to wear my glasses.
As I age and my eyesight gets worse, I'll just keep cranking up the font size.
Are those books available in "e" form from the library?
ReplyDeleteThe digital versions of these old books are available from different sources (I haven't searched anywhere else), but it's super easy for me to find a book and download from Amazon.
ReplyDeleteMy wife works at the library and says Amazon doesn't work with libraries to allow downloading e books onto the Kindle (at least not yet). Google Books as a huge assortment of e books.
ReplyDeleteThe Kindle is very highly regarded as an e reader though, and looks like it would be fun to use. Can you read with it at night without other lights? That would be handy when others are asleep.
Unless it wakes the others up!
ReplyDeleteI'll admit I'm tempted, but have resisted so far. I keep telling myself that those things are a solution to a non-problem, but some of the advantages are starting to pull at me a bit.
ReplyDeleteI'm a hold out too.
ReplyDeleteThere were some papers on education that were only available as downloads that I was iterested in, so that was tempting.
Our librarian just got one, so that may be a sign of the times.
RTP count me in with the anti-Kindle faction. My wife bought an e-book reader, too, and I keep telling her that her gadget will wind up in the box of all dead gadgets, along with all the DRM-protected books she bought to read on it, while all my old-fashioned paper books remain perfectly readable. For certain types of books, though, that you are only likely to read once and never look at again, they make sense to me. I buy very few books like that, though, and usually at used book sales, or from friends that read them once, both channels outlawed with DRM-restricted e-book readers. Bah!
ReplyDeleteI'm loving my Kindle. The book reading experience on them is truly a pleasure. I also load it up with work PDF's so I don't travel around with huge stacks of work papers anymore. It does take some getting used to but I'm not looking back. As far as having a hard copy of a book to keep on your shelf, well if that's important to you then maybe an e-reader is not for you. As for me, after moving my books from one apartment to another umpteen times, I began to see the value of checking out books from the library, and now the Kindle. Instead I keep a digital list of all the books I've read so instead of looking at a bookshelf, I can just look at my list. Oh and I've also got the Kindle app on my iPhone and my laptop so I can truly read my novels anywhere, anytime, never have to carry a book with me, and never have to worry about losing bookmarks.
ReplyDeleteThat's a cool toy, Myles!
ReplyDeletePeace :)
that is cool, I do live in the hub city of the ultimate gizmos, so I personally prefer old-school books but do get really excited when friends get new items. the larsson triology (I have only read the 1st so far, much needed break after that one...) is intense and wickedly distrubing but I have found that it is much talked about from a wide array of readers all over. I still have quick chats and conversations all over town. In my opinion is morbid, but a great novel.
ReplyDeletecheers =)
meli