Saturday, February 09, 2008

Will Wilkonson Loves His Kindle

Here's why:

I am inundated in books. I have way too many. I have no place to put them. I often can’t find them when I want them. I often don’t know what I want to read on a trip, so I carry six heavy books with me, which sucks. I now have something like 20 books in this one little package, and I love it. The e-ink display may be slightly grayer than I’d prefer, but it’s very comfortable too read. I suffer from computer screen-related eyestrain, and I find reading off the Kindle no worse for my eyes than reading a book, and sometimes better, since I can increase the type size. It formats pdfs better than advertised, and I’ve got now got a few free pdf-ed books aboard.

You can carry about all of Project Gutenberg, if you like. I can imagine lots of marginal improvements, but I’m extremely impressed with my Kindle so far and my main complaint is that because everything is not available for the Kindle, I have to keep buying physical books, most of which I don’t really want qua objects. I get lots of publisher’s review copies and I don’t want most of these either. I would be more likely to actually browse these books if the publishers sent the Kindle version. I have actually become emotionally attached to my Kindle. You should probably buy one.

When I look at the stack of case books I have to carry back and forth to law school, I yearn for the day when I can load them all onto a simple divice smaller than most paperback books.  I love the idea of the Kindle but, like I said earlier, I will wait for the next iteration

If the next version is as improved as I'm hoping and can natively read PDF files, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

No comments: