Categories: books
Date: 02 February 2011 19:34:14
I have a Kindle. I have had it for a month now. Kindle is good.
I have read 11 books already. Everything from Ancient Rome (fiction and history), a couple of Pratchett books, the Red Riding Quartet and several others. Today I read while being driven home from work, with my cover light illuminating the page.
This is a great piece of kit and one that I'm really pleased to have bought. I now have over 40 books on the machine and have found myself reading more than one at a time. It is just like reading a book. The font and black and white print make it feel just like a book; even using the cover enhances the fact.
The choice of books is exapnding all the time. A few weeks ago there was only 2 Elmore Leonard books available but now there are a great deal more.
The downside....
You cannot buy books from Amazon.com. As you do not live there that option is not open to you. A great disappointment as there are several books there that I want.
Though you can subscribe to newspapers and magazines some of these are overally expensive; they are not formatted to the Kindle but cut and pasted; photos are removed but the headings remain.
It has web options and speech text but these are more like Beta than finished versions.
The plus side....
Free books. Yes, FREE!!! Tacitus, Plato, classics and others that cost nothing. Even some new books are available.
No more carrying countless books on holiday or running out of things to read. You just order more if that happens, not even to physically enter a shop.
Less clutter at home. Fewer physical books to put on shelves, stack in piles or trip over :-)
No one knows what you are reading or how far in you are. This is a problem for some as it removes Book Snobbery, unless you say: "I'm reading Euripedes in the original Greek" or "I'd never read a Dan Brown novel".
It is environmentally friendly, fewer trees will need to die in future.
For those worried about not owning the physical book and turning pages, don't be. I thought that this would be a problem but now I wish I'd done this years ago. It is as easy as a book, as comforting as a book and as engaging as a book. I have the entire Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire in my bag every day, an English Dictionary and an American Dictionary. I can even download The Bible.