Yes, I’m one of those folks who bought an Amazon Kindle eBook reader last year. And I did so early enough that I actually received it early as well, though not in the first wave of deliveries. I think I got mine the first week of December, so I’ve had it a month now.
The short take is that I love it. I’m a big reader, both of genre fiction and non-fiction history, so I’m always up to ears in books floating around. I am loathe to part with them once I’m finished, so they end up stacked up all over the place until I get so sick of seeing them I put them in the lobby of my building for other folks to take home and stack up in their apartments. Now, with the Kindle, those folks are going to lose out.
Why do I love it?
Well there’s the aforementioned cleanup of clutter for one thing. There’s the ease of shopping – having books delivered almost instantly is great, if a little dangerous on the wallet. Better though is the fact that I can get the first chapter or so of each book as a sample before I purchase. Mostly I’ve purchased the books I thought I would, but I’ve gotten a couple I probably wouldn’t have picked up based on the quality of the sample chapters. In addition I didn’t purchase another book I was sure I’d like – I didn’t.
The device itself isn’t nearly as clunky or ugly as many have made it out to be both on the Amazon review section for the Kindle and in general reports out on the net. I think many of these folks based their judgments on pictures of the device and not on any actual experience.
And what’s with that – so many of the reviews on Amazon, especially the negative ones, are based on the what they’ve read and not on actually holding the machine or using it. Some give it 1 star simply because they don’t think they’d like it. A review is supposed to be about one’s actual experience with a product. Otherwise we’d see movie reviews written by folks who hadn’t seen the movie. Maybe that’s a bad example – I think we do see that quite often. 🙂
Anway I love mine. I’ve read more books in the last month than I had in the three previous months, so for that alone I’m grateful – I much prefer reading to TV, but when I don’t have a fresh book it’s too easy to turn the darn thing on.
I’m not going to write a huge review here, but if you want more information, I suggest visiting Amazon and reading the reviews from folks who actually own one and not those from folks who think that eBooks mark the end of civilization. That started some time ago and had nothing to do with books, ‘e’ or otherwise. 🙂
Aloha!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…