The much overdue Kindle post.

I have a confession to make.

In January I finally broke down and bought a Kindle, using some of my Christmas money.
It isn't really that I didn't like books - their solid feel, the scent of paper, the stories and knowledge within; it was more that I liked them TOO much.

Yes, I ran out of shelf room. Believe me, you do NOT want to see what is crammed onto my limited shelving. I'm a dedicated library user; my rare purchases are all books that I REALLY want. However, it was getting to the point where I'd have to discard a book for every one that I bought. Weeding my collection had been hard enough the last time that I moved; I simply could not pack up and keep them all at the time. The process ended up being a triage of determining which I wanted to keep, which I was less attached to, and which I could reliably find at a public library. Still, it was not an experience a dedicated book hoarder would want to repeat.

Not to mention that the books are really heavy to move.
Friends help you move.
REALLY GOOD friends help you move books. :)

Thus, I went with the Kindle. Small, light, portable, and capable of holding thousands of titles.
Hopefully it will NOT be breakable. I did invest in a protective cover and am not planning to do any bubble bath reading with it in the foreseeable future.

My initial impressions have been favorable. I like the electronic ink screen and have no trouble reading it even with a dim lamp. Navigation is mostly intuitive. Downloading titles is easy. The Kindle also seems to be curbing the extremely bad habit I have of skipping forward within a novel.

There are some drawbacks. Not all titles are available. It probably would not do any sort of justice to photographs or drawings. Thus its use is best limited to books of prose, and it would not work well for a graphic novel or any sort of book with photos or illustrations.

Overall, I really do like my new gadget. The Kindle is solving a major problem for me, and is also fun and easy to use.

I suppose the next thing I have to worry about is how fast I can fill up the memory space on a Kindle...

...uh oh. ;)