Amazon Kindle

We finally bought a Kindle.  Tanya is a book snob a traditionalist, so it was an uphill battle for sure.  She could admit the merits, but refused to believe she could survive reading on a screen instead of paper.

But I'd been watching Eli read Lord of the Rings, his first big book, and boy is it a big one.  Being a young reader, he does better with larger type, but the print in this book was necessarily small.  And partially due to its size and age, the book was not surviving being handled by a 9-year-old — the pages were falling out about as fast as he was reading them.

I saw the Kindle as a solution to this problem and ordered one.  Because you're buying books in a proprietary format it feels like a bigger commitment than just the cost of the device, which is relatively inexpensive.  We also don't have room for stuff we don't use, so every purchase carries the potential repsponsibility of having to store or dispose of the thing.  I'm also an inveterate shopper, especially for gadgets, and try to make double sure that I need a thing before I buy it.  Double again if it's shiny.

We had friends over the day it arrived.  Everyone had heard of the Kindle, but nobody had actaully seen one.  All were amazed by the screen.

Eli took to it like duck on a junebug.  That big paper book went in the trash the next day.  The boat was already lighter.

A few days later, Tanya requested that book she is reading to the kids be acquired in Kindle format.  Another one in the trash.  Kindle wins!

When I converted our music from CDs to MP3s there was no additional cost, so I'm not looking forward to re-buying all of our books on the Kindle.  But if it means getting them off the boat, it will be worth it.  Unfortunately, we have lots of books that aren't available on the Kindle, so it isn't a 100% solution at this point.  But there are a lot of old classics that we don't have and are FREE (as in beer) on the Kindle.

There may yet be another benefit in the works.  Aaron is our techno kid, but doesn't read for pleasure yet, and it is driving him insane that he doesn't get to play with the new toy.

Right now we have seperate books being read by three people on the same device without conflict, but I'm sure eventually we'll be ready for one or two more.