Like the other Kindle owners here, I love my Kindle. And as I was formerly a printer I suppose I shouldn’t be saying that. However, you can’t turn back progress, just learn to live with it.
My wife bought mine for my birthday last year and she was so taken with it that I had to buy her one as an advance Christmas gift.
The advantages I find are the same as the other people on this forum – ease of buying books (can be a disadvantage if you’re on a strict budget), its capacity (up to 3000 books at a time), being able to take it when travelling thus, saving yourself the bother of filling up a suitcase with books. Last year I downloaded Steinbeck’s America and Americans while riding on a train between Washington, DC and Chicago. Don’t forget, either, that the typeface can be set smaller or larger, for anyone who doesn’t have 20/20 vision.
There are lots of free books at Amazon or other web sites, and I have gleefully downloaded a fair number, in keeping with my pastime of catching up on the classics I missed out on during my working life. I’ve downloaded the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, all the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, works by H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. de Vere Stacpoole’s The Blue Lagoon, 27 novels by Jules Verne, Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all 6 volumes) and Conrad’s Lord Jim. That’s not to say that I’ve ignored modern writers – I also have the latest books by Wilbur Smith, Tom Clancy, Jonathan Kellerman and Frederick Forsyth.
Of course, anything so handy and convenient must have its drawbacks, and Kindle does have a few. My biggest gripe is in the non-fiction field, where it’s not easy to move about inside a book to check on references or footnotes – a very fiddly business involving inserting electronic bookmarks all over the place. Maps or illustrations are also sometimes difficult to read.
I don’t think Kindle or any other type of electronic reader will totally replace books, especially not large format atlases or works covering fine art subjects, but for the average reader who loves to get lost in a novel or thriller it’s an absolute Godsend.
I’ve caught up on so many of the classics I failed to read during my working life: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Les Miserables; The Count of Monte Cristo; Wuthering Heights; The Country of the Blind, and so on. I haven’t yet started on the Decline and Fall, but I’ll get around to it.
So would I give up my Kindle? Does a dog give up a bone?
