Kindle My Desire

A little more on the Kindle. I like it. I really do. However, the Kindle and e-books in general do have their set of problems. Here is a short list:

1. E-Ink technology provides for a crisp, non-flickering display that is extremely frugal with respect to battery life. Good, yes, but refreshing a page is tediously slow by today's expectations. It also flashes rather annoyingly. This makes the Kindle less suited for non-linear reading. I've read a couple of technical books on the Kindle and sometimes I want to look back a few pages.  This is not particularly fun.  And, even though an excellent feature of the Kindle is being able to add bookmarks, annotations, etc., navigating through a list of these is rather cumbersome.
    
   
2. Another downside of the E-Ink technology is contrast.  The screen is dark gray ink on a light gray background.  For me, this is fine, but arguably not as easy to read for long times as high-quality printed matter.
    
   
3. Due to DRM, you can't share a book or a newspaper.  I understand the concern.  If someone could buy a book in digital form and then give it to a friend, perhaps they would consider all the world to be friends and thus only a single copy of the book would be sold and the author and publisher wouldn't be happy.  But, this means I can't buy a book, read it and then loan it to a friend to read.  And, if I live in a household and subscribe to a newspaper, I can't share it with my housemates.  They would each have to have a separate subscription.
    
   
4. It is a high-tech gizmo and can be a target of thieves and can break if dropped.  Regular books rarely have these problems.
    
   
5. It is too expensive, but prices of the Kindle (and competing e-readers) will doubtless come down over time.

And so on.  Yes, there are issues.  But I sitll love my Kindle and recommend it to anyone who really likes to read.  The positives, such as having a library on the go, being able to get books and newspapers instantly via wireless transfer, annotations, bookmarks, dictionary lookup, adjustable font sizes and on and on more than overcome the tradeoffs.

Reading is FUNdaMENTAL!

I just added a "Books I've Read" page and listed what I've read over the past year.  Wow!  33 books.  For me, that is a lot.  I've always liked reading, but had gotten away from it for the past few years.  Alas, I am a slow book reader, as my attention easily wanders ... sometimes off-topic and sometimes I just enter the world of the book and ponder things from that perspective. 

So, I might as well admit it, what has helped me to read so many books is audible.com!  Most of the books I've "read" in the past year I've done by listening to the audio version.  It just doesn't sound right to say, "Books I've Listened To".  For all intent and purpose, I read them.  I would argue that a well-produced audio book is at least equal to reading and in some ways vastly superior.  Books (especially novels, but even much non-fiction) are stories.  And, stories were traditionally told by word-of-mouth.  The printed word gave us a new way to tell stories and I'm not knocking it.  But, for me, a well-read audio book is simply wonderful.  I almost always read unabridged versions.  And the narrator is key.  There are some books that I haven't read (listened to) because I didn't like the narrator.  Perhaps those I will read (with my eyes) on my Kindle.

Try audible.com.  You'll like it.  And since I'm a fan of TWIT (This Week in Tech) with Leo Laporte, I will suggest that you use the TWIT promo code, which gives you the first two books free when you begin an Audible Platinum membership (2 books a month):  http://www.audible.com/twit2