I bought my Kindle a few months ago and have had the opportunity to play with it. It’s filled in for “real” books a number of times.
A few advantages (there have been no disadvantages …yet!):
1. It’s very, very easy to travel with. I found myself getting lost in reading the books I have (I’m up to around 90 now) in busy airports while waiting to board, on the plane, in the car while my mother is shopping when I’m home on vacation. I was reading in the comfy chairs in stores while my mother tried on clothes…you get the picture. (Love you, Mom!!)
2. Use it as a supplement to real books. I’m an avid speed reader. I can read up to 40 books in a month. Now, if I were to do this buying books, it’d cost me a fortune. So of course, I use the great library system here in Atlanta. However, sometimes books I really want by authors I trust have an incredible wait time at the library. I buy those on my kindle. Sometimes I want to read a book that’s 1200 pages long. That, too, I buy for my kindle. Why? Because as much as I love the smell of real books, I cherish my hands more. They hurt when holding up that many pages for the length of time it takes to read a book of that size… even at the speed I read.
3. My Kindle encourages my six year old nephew to read. He loves gadgets and electronics and he’s always begging me for a chance to read the Kindle. I downloaded several books for him and next thing I know he’s losing himself in them as well – and giggling because instead of turning a page, he gets to press a button.
4. The battery is incredibly long lived. I am horrible at charging things and one of the things I was worried about was having to wait for my battery to charge when I, inevitably, forgot to charge the kindle. I just keep my wireless turned off (unless I need it for some reason) and I can go for weeks without having to charge. So, there’s no wait period for my Kindle. I was worried about that.
5. It looks like paper. There’s no glare. Really. It’s not a gimmick! In fact, I think Amazon should give me royalties. Every time I go to the coffee shop or store and read my Kindle I make at least 2 sales of it. After having read about 5000 pages on my Kindle I can tell you my eyes are no more strained than if I read real books (and my hands are considerably less strained). And.. I don’t have to search for bookmarks or dogear pages (gasp). It saves my spot, right there, for me. Oh, and that passage that I loved so much that I wanted to share with my friends and family, there’s a clipping of it. I made that and it’s so much easier to find then stammering as I search dramatically through the paper book I’m reading. A friend said it best. The Kindle is a supplement to real books. Is it expensive? Sure. It’s pricey. But I was paying $30 round trip 4-5 times a year to bring books home to read. I was juggling 2 books when close to the end of one and I wanted to take the kids to the park. How often can you stand in line somewhere and pull a book easily out of your purse to read without having to fiddle with keeping it open? It seems silly and like these are little things, but they all add up to making that $260 price tag worth it. My kindle has already paid for itself in new books, travel expenses and experiences enjoyed.
As a side note: Why didn’t I go for the Sony E-Reader or wait for the B&N Nook? Simple. I don’t want to touch the screen I’m reading, so touch screens were out. I wanted wireless capabilities, so Sony was out. And I didn’t want to be distracted by flashy, color pictures at the bottom of my screen, so the Nook was doubly out. I wanted simple, functional, a use-able keyboard, wireless and compact, and the Kindle fulfilled everything I was asking from it.
Good post. I am still undecided on how I feel about reeders but you speak well of Kindle here…. hmmm… one of these days
I love my kindle! I know they’ve come down in price quite a bit, but I still wish they were cheaper so I could buy more of them for gifts.
My library and I are not close friends. I seem to be burdened with bad luck to have incredibly grumpy librarians, who all seem to know that I have a habit of late returns. My dad and I joke that between the two of us, we’ve probably funded entire wings of libraries.
Which is where the kindle fits in well for me. It’s actually cheaper for me to buy some books than to pay my fines! Silly me… I really need to be better about returning books. But no worries with the kindle!
What I’m hoping for in the near future, is a library e-book service like what OverDrive has done for library audio books. Most libraries around the country now use OverDrive. Basically, you can download audio books, and listen to them for two weeks before they stop working (unless you’ve burned them to a cd or put them on your ipod). It’s an automatic way to never have a late fee! I love it! I’m hoping that e-books are headed that way too – a limited number available to each library for a limited amount of time… you could download a book to your reader, and it would only be readable for that set time… and then would disappear from your reader. Then I would use my library a lot more than I do now!
This past year, most of my book purchases have been for my kindle. Like you said, Lydia, I forget that I’m reading on the kindle after a time. I also like that the “next page” button is on both sides of the kindle. I can hold my kindle in either hand, or have it propped up in my bed while reading on my side, and easily access it.
I’ve also used the audio features on the kindle (with the Overdrive stuff mentioned above). You can download mp3 books to your computer and then manually put them on your kindle while using the USB cord. The audio quality is surprisingly good given that this is not designed as an mp3 player.
My kindle is also used for tutoring. I use it every week with my students. They read off of the kindle, and I follow along on my iPhone with the kindle app. It was cheaper to do this than to purchase two books, or to borrow from the library for an extended time (it’s taking us months to get through The Dawn Treader). The students love reading on the kindle – for some reason it’s so much more fun than regular books! And they also like the dictionary feature. They use that quite a lot mid-reading to quickly find out what a word means.