While Ronni’s parents were visiting, her mom showed off her new toy: Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle.
She’s clearly happy with it, and just from playing around with it for a few minutes, I could see why. It was very easy to read and navigate. Ronni and I had both been thinking about getting the Kindle, and her parents took pity on us – 
– and bought us each one. They arrived today.
I should say that, despite how impressed I was from the demo I got over the weekend, I have some nostalgic reservations. I like books. About some things, I’m very old-fashioned. One might even say I can be a bit of a luddite. But I also realize that among the books, comics, CDs, DVDs and so on, Ronni and I are going to run out of room. And since I refuse to discard anything I have ever acquired, something has to give. I’ve largely stopped by CDs (except from some artists). Not buying a ton of books is probably a good idea, unless we want to move into a bigger house. And I buy a lot of books I don’t really care if I have the physical product in my hand. An electronic version suits many of these just fine. So when I got my Kindle, I was ready to hit the ground running.
First things first. I had to download some books. My first three purchases were almost no-brainers. Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away is a book I’ve been wanting to read for a very long time. I suspect it’s going to be a very hard and emotional read. But I figure I can work on it a little a time. Bill Moyer’s Moyers on Democracy is near the top of my summer reading list. And then Bart Ehrman’s new book, God’s Problem. (Incidentally, independent of the whole Kindle discussion, this is a very good book. I’ve already read the first chapter. I swear I could have written parts of it verbatim. If you have any interest at all in the problem of evil, this looks to be a very good treatment of it.)
Downloading books is super-fast. After waiting for CDs to download, this seemed to take no time at all. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve already read my first chapter. And that reading already has helped form a pretty solid first impression.
The book is really easy on the eyes. The write-up suggests that the Kindle mimics paper, and it certainly was true that there was no glare and no eye-strain. It was very easy to turn pages and keep reading, all of which made it possible to get lost in the book. That’s good.
One of the difficulties I ran across may not be experienced by many users. I was reading a book with endnotes. And I like looking at the end notes. It took a bit of doing to find them. (This was partly due to my inability to be patient enough to read the manual.) Once I got back to the endnotes, it was easy enough to return to my place in the text itself. The real problem was going back for the next endnote. Because I knew what I was doing it was faster, but not as fast as flipping a physical book’s pages. The solution quickly suggested itself as I remembered I could bookmark multiple pages in the book.
Even highlighting and making notes in the margin were fairly straightforward. It takes a bit more effort than in a physical book, but not much. And I was doing so rather quickly. Plus, more room for notes (since they are digital).
Maybe the biggest plus for me is that I can read, turn pages, and still have a hand free for playing with my hair while I read. 
Obviously I have more to find out and play with. There are limits that must be pushed, after all. But so far, I’m very happy with this. I think I’m going to enjoy have a slightly smaller stack of stuff next to my bed.
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