Allahpundit is enthusiastic about the new Kindle.
Ace, however, is not.
The main objection that I can see is the steep price. The latest version is $359.
While books are easy to carry, and I do love the feel of a book, the smell, the touch of the paper, the weight of the volume and all that, the Kindle has the advantage that you can also increase the size of the type, and you can have a library of 1,500 books right in it.
But that means I won’t have a handy excuse to go browsing at bookstores, one of my favorite pastimes.
Anyway, my birthday’s not until September, so there’s time to decide.
Have any of you bought a Kindle? Are you happy (or not) with it?
A kindle would be ideal for me when riding the bus, but the price tag puts it out my reach.
Hmmm…maybe I could slip a line item in the stimulus bill…. 🙂
1. Buy Kindle.
2. Browse at bookstore.
3. Turn on Kindle and buy book.
4. Enjoy.
And, yeah, I love mine and I read far more books now than I have in the recent past when I was confined to consuming dead trees.
I got one second hand from a neighbor who seemed also befuddled by having to put her VCR on channel 3 to record her soaps. It’s great for disposable fiction but anything more serious remains best on paper. But this marks my complete surrender to fuddy-duddyism and I now sit crankily extolling the Golden Age virtues of the printed page, vinyl 78s, stick shifts, cherry bombs and card catalogs in the public libraries.
The price is still to high. And as a librarian, I can tell you, we were dancing in the stacks when we finally got rid of the card catalog! :0)
Dancing electrons on a screen, leaking batteries, and radiation poisoning do not good reading make. I’ll keep finding leather bound on Amazon as long as the trees hold out.
How much will cost the ebooks?
The audio books are $9.99 each, except for Kindle-only special editions which are less.
I’d also add that you can get thousands of free books (classics, mainly) at manybooks.net (in Kindle format) which pretty much instantly pays for the device (assuming,of course, you want to read such works–and everyone should!)
Hi there, just came across your blog doing a search on Google for Amazon Kindle Product Reviews. My personal opinion is that the Kindle really blows away the Sony Reader and all other products out there, and the Kindle 2 will be Amazing! Can’t wait for the Feb. 24th release date!!!
i just ordered one, because my book collection still grows rather than shrinking. have you priced *bookcases*, lately? the last time we bought shelving we were *stunned*. considering that the kindle will ‘shelve’ 1500 books, the price is really not that bad. i am extremely interested in this technology anyway, so for me personally it feels like time to live with it firsthand to see what i really think. (i’m not getting rid of the print collection. i love print. but upon looking into my heart, i realized that i have been buying books more than reading them, these days.)
re. ‘books are easy to carry’: huh? oh yeah. that’s why i re-read so much agatha christie on my commute. those are easy to carry. ‘infinite jest’ was my read last summer. my fingers still hurt. and bringing a dictionary means bringing a second, probably larger book. i didn’t do that. kindle has a good dictionary built in and searchable from within any text one is reading. and one can upload one’s professional reading — i hear it handles text-heavy pdf’s extremely well. (pdf graphs, etc. not so much.)
we’ll see how it goes. i will have rules about what can be a kindle edition and what has to be print. my ultimate goal is to read more; and comfortably. of course i don’t *know* what the outcome will be; but i have reason to be hopeful.
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