Our New Toy, A Kindle

Staples recently sent me a bunch of store credit, a hundred and fourteen dollars in store credit to be precise.  They call it 'Staples Rewards' and I'm not exactly sure why they sent it to me, I guess we must have bought a lot of printer ink.  At first I wasn't sure what I'd do, I don't need a hundred dollars worth of spiral notebooks and push pins, but then I realized that Staples sells the Kindle.  So I spent my credit and an extra $25 to purchase my first electronic reading device.

Kindle surrounded by some of my treasures

Copyright Jeff Howick 2011

It's an incredible piece of technology, the Kindle.  It's very thin and even lighter than I thought it would be.  I quickly downloaded H. G. Wells' 'The Time Machine' (for free) and started reading it to see how it felt on my eyes.  In my opinion, reading on the Kindle is almost as nice as a real book.  I wish the background were a bit whiter, it's currently light grey, but it's clear enough that I don't notice once I start reading.  Downloading books is quick, easy and nearly all of the great classics in the public domain are available for free.

As nice as the Kindle is, we don't really need it, not yet anyway.  I get all of my books from the library, so the fact that ebooks are usually cheaper than their tree killing counterparts doesn't matter much to me.  And we don't do enough traveling to put Kindle's ability to carry thousands of books in its tiny package to real use.  But later this year my wife and I are planning to move to Japan, where English books will be much harder to find.  We bought the Kindle so that when we leave America, we won't have to sacrifice our ability to read any book we want whenever we want.  Buying a Kindle brings us one step closer to Japan, and I'm starting to realize how very close we actually are.