So my big Christmas present (apart from the USB turntable, which I wrote about here) is my fancy new Amazon Kindle.
Okay. A few things. First, I do not want to see the death of real bookstores. Ever. Second, yes the good old traditional book is a really spectacular piece of technology. It has excellent battery life and best of all, from my perspective, you can spill a cup of coffee on it without making it useless.
And now a couple of guilty confessions. One is that I don't read nearly as much as I should, especially given that my job is stealing from other writ...uh, I mean, writing. I mean, I usually have a book going at all times, but what with the three kids and the dog and the kitchen that stubbornly refuses to clean itself, I've got a lot of stuff competing for my time, and during the school year, anyway, I don't often find myself with big chunks of time I can devote to reading. (My video game time shrinks to nonexistent, which I suppose is not really a bad thing.)
Another guilty confession. I love me some gadgets. I'm still using my nearly 3-year-old ipod, and my computer is about the same age, but I like ogling gadgets, I like things with cool features. Sometimes on a busy afternoon, the computer calls to me in a way a book doesn't just because it's a cool gadget. And I do end up reading on the computer a lot, but it's emails and blogs and newspapers and not books.
So, here's one thing I love about the Kindle. It's a gadget--that contains books! I'm all set to read more. It's a toy and I want to play with it, and the way you play with it is by reading.
Also cool is the whole wireless thing. Read about a book, own a book within two minutes. That is hot stuff. I suffer from a disorder many people I know suffer from, which is that the book I was looking for goes out of my brain the second I walk into the bookstore. So that's cool.
The screen looks great, it handles illustrations credibly (I've been reading China Mieville's Un Lun Dun on it, and the illustrations look really good. I mean, photos and stuff it probably wouldn't handle that well, but the pen and ink illustrations look really cool. ), you can size the type for the comfort of your personal eyes, you can look up any word in the text with two clicks...all this is just so cool I can hardly stand it.
The battery life is very good, especially with the wireless connectivity turned off. (And since I only use that for shopping, it's fine.) Not as good as a traditional book, but pretty good nonetheless.
New books are ten bucks, so I don't have to wait for the paperback to get an affordable version. (of course, if you factor in the cost of the gadget itself, it will take you 30 or 40 books before you come out ahead. But I got it as a gift...) If this thing catches on, I think it could help a lot of writers, particularly fiction writers. I'm willing to gamble ten bucks on just about any book, but I pretty much never plunk down 25 for a book by an unknown quantity.
I like the fact that I can carry several books in it. I've often had the experience of heading to a doctors appointment or something and being almost done with one book and having to carry two. Also, if I happen to want to read some big cumbersome book (like that omnibus edition of His Dark Materials I was reading last week), the Kindle is way easier to carry.
Things that are weird but not necessarily bad: there's a momentary flash of black when you "turn" the "page". You can still get lost in the book, but it does take a little getting used to. Also, since you can make the text any size you want, the pages aren't numbered. Instead you have "locations", of which Un Lun Dun has several thousand. I'm not sure exactly what the locations pertain to, since they're not line numbers or words or pages, but anyway, it's somewhat harder to judge your progress through the book when you can't flip through the pages. I don't know if this is good or bad. It's easy to bookmark pages, and if you turn it off, you come back right at the same page you left off on.
What does it all mean? I don't know. All I know is that I'm reading a kick ass book on a really cool gadget, and I've already got the new Charlie Huston on deck.
Recent Comments