Let me just say this: I love the kindle!
We went on a vacation to Phoenix over spring break, and I had downloaded one of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books. The books are very, very light. They're not great literature, but they're fun, fast reads. Unfortunately, they're a little too fast. By the time we had arrived in Phoenix, with all of the waiting at the airport and reading on the plane, I had already finished my novel. If I had carried the actual book with me, I would have been stuck on vacation with nothing to read, a fate practically worse than death, since vacations are about the only time I really do a lot of reading. Luckily, though, I had the kindle instead. I simply downloaded the next book in the series. I went through three of Evanovich's novels, in addition to reading several other things. The kindle made it so that I didn't need to carry a bunch of reading material, and I could choose real-time what I was going to read.
I've also always been a fan of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. My mom bought an entire bag full of these magazines when I was about 16. We spent the next three weeks or so reading every one of them. Each edition has about 1 or 2 stories that are really good, well-written with a great twist. I love those stories. Each edition also has several that are pretty good, and 1 or 2 that you read and ask yourself how they could have published that story. As a writer, I have submitted several stories to EQMM, none of which they've published (but several of them found homes elsewhere). Unfortunately, I found that life got in the way of my reading, and I let my subscription slip. My mom sent me out a couple that had a lot of really good stories in them about a two years ago, and my dog ate them. Imagine my delight when I discovered that EQMM is now available on the kindle! Now they download automatically to my kindle, and I read them as I have time. Sometimes I miss an entire issue, sometimes I read the entire issue, but it's inexpensive and nice to turn on my kindle and find a new EQMM, and the dogs have not expressed in interest in eating the kindle. The only drawback is that the kindle still has no notion of page numbers, a difficult problem for them because page number would change with they're varying font size. Still, I wish they could at least publish the page numbers as they might appear in the actual magazine, because I have no idea how long or short a story is going to be. If I start reading a story, should I stop soon because it's so long? Or will I be done in a minute anyway? I just don't know. That's frustrating.
The other problem with a kindle over an actual book comes when you're reading a reference book or other type of non-fiction where you want to keep a couple of pages marked. It's very difficult on the kindle, even with their bookmark feature, to go back and reference a page like you would a book. My most recent example is in reading a diet book that I want to go straight to the actual diet. Sometimes you can't tell from the table of contents where the diet is, but in a real book, you can flip through and find the diet easily enough. With a real book, too, you can mark a couple of pages, have the recipes that you want available, and have the diet available. If you reference those pages enough, the books just naturally opens to them.
However, the best thing that I've found with the kindle is the ability to increase the font size as my eyes get worse. My last diet book had a tiny, tiny font (okay, my kids could read it easily). Who needs reading glasses, though, when you've got the kindle, that can make each letter practically the size of the page so that I can read it?
Overall, the kindle rocks!
Requires the monitoring agency to invest heavily in receiver technology which is proprietary to one manufacturer.
Posted by: fire system tempe | February 09, 2012 at 07:37 AM