For my birthday, last November, my father-in-law bought me a Kindle. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Kindle is an electronic book-reader. I knew I wanted one as soon as they were announced. Then, after reading more about it on a fellow RVers blog, I had to have one!
Thank you Pop Guld! I love my Kindle.
I love to read, but I don’t get to do anywhere near as much as I like. Books are heavy, so we don’t carry many in the RV. The hardest part of selling our house and getting rid of all our possessions was the bookshelves full of books. I have to *really* want a book to buy it, or I have to luck into a good find at a park’s lending/trading library.
While driving home from my Father-in-Law’s house with my new Kindle, I heard a review on NPR radio about a book by Maya Angelou, called ‘Letter to my Daughter.‘ I’ve read Maya Angelou before and knew I would enjoy this book. I got out the Kindle, turned on it’s wireless button, clicked the button for the ‘Kindle Store’ and searched for the book.
Within a minute, the book was on my Kindle and my credit card had been charged $9.99. Like a kid with a new toy, I found a quiet corner and curled up with my Kindle. By the next day (it was a short book 
I had finished reading that book, and was ready to download another one! Oh the Joy!
For the last couple weeks, I’ve had to go to the dentist a lot. Believe it or not, I look forward to my appointments because I take my Kindle with me and get a lot of reading in while I’m waiting for Novocaine to take effect and all the other various wait times that happen at the dentist. The dentist got curious and asked about the Kindle and what I was reading. I told her that I was almost finished reading ‘Water for Elephants’ – a fascinating tale about working for the traveling circus during the Depression. She wrote down the name of that book, and shared with me the book she was currently reading – ‘My Sister’s Keeper.’ While I was still in the dentist chair, I downloaded a free sample of ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ to be sure I liked it before buying. I did, and the next Dentist appointment I was able to have a book discussion with my Dentist because I was already about a third of the way thru.
There is one BIG problem with the Kindle that I need to tell you about. I can’t read it until I pry it out of Jim’s hands!
As if he doesn’t read enough articles on the Web, he subscribed to the Kindle version of Time magazine – $2/mo I think. Every week a new issue appears on the Kindle’s table of contents and, I think, he is reading them from cover to cover.
I knew it would be great to be able to download new books any time, I also expected the Kindle to be as portable as a paperback and to be easy to read because I could increase the size of the type. What I didn’t expect was that the Kindle would be *more* portable than a book. I can read it with no hands! I like to read while I’m eating. With a paperback, that is very difficult. You need at least one hand for your food and one hand for your book, then you need both hands to turn the page. With the Kindle, you can set it down on the table and read it, maybe even prop it up at a perfect reading angle. When you need to turn the page, all you need is a thumb or even an elbow to bump the ‘Next Page’ bar on the side.
There are some downsides, pictures are poor. I downloaded one technical, computer-help book, and the diagrams and screenshots are worthless. It is also difficult to thumb thru and find that chapter you remember. You can easily bookmark important places, but, if you don’t … you’re lost. I love it for reading novels, not so much for technical manuals. The new Kindle is supposed to have better graphics. I haven’t seen one.
Oh yeah … the other drawback is the price – $350! As I said in the beginning of this post, Thank you Pop Guld!
Ok, enough writing .. time to go read!
If you’re thinking about buying one for your very own, it would be great if you used this link – then we get a little commission too.
