About 2 months ago, I was waiting outside for my bus to come and take me to work. Stephanie, in her typical awesome self, got me a small box of quarters so that I could purchase my newspaper every morning. I love reading the newspaper, but I hate having it delivered due to the paper pile up. So I inserted my quarters into the newspaper vending machine and as usual it decided to keep my paper as ransom. At that very moment, technology mixed with impulse spending kicked in, and I ordered the Amazon Kindle right from my iPhone.

It is by far the best impulse purchase I’ve made yet. My argument against the Kindle has always been price, price, price. While it’s still difficult to swallow the idea of dropping $259 for the privilege to do LESS with your books than you can normally, (Checkout from the library, loan, dog ear) it was still a worthwhile investment. For me the single greatest advantage is the digital newspaper. The Chicago Tribune offers a Kindle version of their paper that gets sent to your device at 3am every morning. The trick is, it gets sent directly to your Kindle. There is no need to sync with your PC. So in the morning, I wake up in bed, turn my night light on and begin reading the paper. I’ll read for maybe 20 or 30 minutes in bed before I get up and shower. I’ll read a bit while eating breakfast and on the bus ride to work.  All with absolutely zero pieces of paper to manage, throw out or recycle. THAT’S WHAT’S HOT!

I haven’t even talked about the book reading features yet. My number one feature when reading books on the Kindle can be summed up in a word; Whispersync. Whispersync allows you to sync your books and the last reading location across your Kindle, iPhone/iPod Touch and your PC/Mac. While I do 95% of my reading on the Kindle, it’s nice when I’ve got some time to kill to be able to say “excuse me, while I whip this out”. Waiting in line, waiting for Stephanie to get out of the dressing room and yes, while taking a dump, you can get in a few pages of reading easily. (And with the phone it’s a lot less conspicuous than carrying a book or your entire Kindle with you to the crapper. It’s too big for your pocket) I slip in a few extra pages here and there. The only problem is that sometimes the Kindle gets a little wonky and loses your page. Due to the varying screen sizes, page counts wouldn’t be accurate throughout the different devices. Instead the Kindle uses a Location data field. It’s like a page count that I believe stays consistent through all of the various devices. So if the Kindle gets set to the wrong page, you’ll have to fumble your way through the interface to find your last location.

While the Kindle to books is less revolutionary than the MP3 to CDs was, it is still a welcome addition to my gadgets library. The E-Ink technology is easy on the eyes, giving you a paper-like quality. I would caution though, if you’re a super fast reader like some folks I know, the smaller screen size may annoy you due to the rapid page turning you will tend to do. The E-Ink technology has a kind of funky screen refresh cycle, so that when you go to the next page, everything goes black and then paints the image accordingly. For my reading speed it’s not a big deal, but for some of you speed readers out there, you could be ticked off.

With Barnes and Noble, Sony and Amazon now all in the game, I expect E-books to take off in terms of availability.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.