I love my Kindle! Speaking from the standpoint of a person who has begun to suspect that she doesn't own the books, but instead the books own her, I ask myself before every book purchase, is it possible to get it on Kindle. Moving to a bigger house is not a possibility and there are no more walls for shelves. When I buy more books, I go to my shelves and try to find ones that I can get rid of to donate to the library book sale. But, the library book sale is so flooded with books that they stop taking them after a week. Meanwhile, I live near a city of readers with small apartments who force books on you because they "think you will like them", and sometimes even secretly leave bags of them in your house. There seems to be some rule against throwing away books, so no one can do it. Yes, some books, like lace books, reference books, books with a lot of pictures and books that will be used in wet places are better in paper. But books that are just read are cheaper in the Kindle edition, and they can be reread and they don't waste trees. In fact, I probably have 50 books on my Kindle (I think its capacity is over a thousand) and that means I don't have to have a shelf in my house for them. When I go somewhere with a high expectation of time to read, I often decide I need a book that is easy to read and fast moving for some occasions, and a book that is difficult to read because I really want to read it. But what if I am almost finished with both the easy and the hard book. If I am within 50 pages of the end, then I need a back-up book, in case I finish it. This starts to weigh a lot. The Kindle is lighter than any single book, but it can be an infinite number of books, and you can hold it and turn pages with one hand. This is convenient because I sometimes lose circulation in my hands or have them cramp up from prolonged book holding. In addition, suppose you are somewhere and you desperately need a book because you haven't bothered to download one in advance or you didn't know how long a glucose tolerance test took. Then you can download and read several excerpts of books for free and decide which one to buy. The excerpts are quite long. Often more than a chapter and there are a lot of books I decide not to buy after reading the first 40 pages or so. During my glucose tolerance test I downloaded one preview after another of books I had thought I wanted to read, before deciding which one was actually worth reading and buying and downloading that. Thus you can equip yourself with a book from anywhere. This reins in the expensive practice of "stockpiling" books that you think you may want to read, but never actually do, because you happen to see a physical copy and are afraid you won't be able to find a physical copy on that day you actually want to read it. The electrical cost of the Kindle is negligible compared to the savings on the Kindle editions and the charge on the battery seems to last forever. I only wish there were more books in Kindle format. I love libraries, and sometimes find myself checking out a book that I think I must own, but the library organizes them so you can find them. They have a paid staff to do it. Many of my books are not organized by any other principle than the size of the shelf. My wallet bulges with library cards and I was asked to serve on a focus group for the future of my local library. A very interesting thing that emerged from the focus group was that the older participants were converting to Kindle, despite liking the "feel of holding a book and the sensation of the paper pages", because of the weight factor of carrying books, and once they converted, they loved not having to port books around on vacation. Meanwhile, the younger participants, parents mostly, were reading Kindles themselves, but were adamant that their children be exposed to paper books with lots of illustrations, lovingly read by librarians or parents, in a fun atmosphere. I thought that this was sort of interesting, since it was imperative to book loving parents that children be exposed to books the way the parents were, but that the children would actually be observing their parents reading Kindles not paper books, and as we all know, children actually tend to want to copy their parents because their activities look "grown-up". As for audio books, they are great for marathon lace making sessions. Sometimes I put the TV on while making lace, but there is this visual aspect of TV that I then miss. With audio books that is not the case. Then, when the effects of marathon lace making sessions begin to impinge on my health, I disconnect the chiclet sized device that I keep only for audio books from its speaker, clip it to my T-shirt and connect the earphones and go for a walk or to the gym. I only wish there were more books on audio books! I think that the various shortcomings of the e-readers, such as not being too good with pictures, etc. will be solved by future developments with the e-readers, or perhaps even specialization of reading devices. At my daughter's school the poor kids were carrying back-packs that were so heavy that it was a serious health concern, and at the time we were all eager for developments that would make it possible to have the text books on electronic format. Maybe that has been worked out by now. The biggest problem with the Kindle, right now, is that the airlines won't let you turn them on during the first few moments of a flight, which I believe is a lot of hokum. But, I imagine that this too shall pass. Right now I am facing a bout of jury duty and wondering if I can take the Kindle there. My husband thinks there might be some issue with that because of the need to isolate jurors. Devon
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