Gen X Journey

Oprah just loves her Kindle. In her own over the top words she describes it as life changing and the wave of the future. And I thought I liked my Kindle. Not sure if it’s any of those things.  I just think it’s convenient and a little bit cool.

Anyway for anyone out there who is considering getting a Kindle I’ve made a list of pros and cons.

Pros

• It’s lightweight
• You can get any book that you fancy in less than five minutes from the online Kindle store
• It lets you highlight and annotate pages
• It keeps your place for you whichever book you’re reading
• You can carry hundreds of books round at once
• You will never be stuck reading old magazines at the dentist again.
• You always have a choice of books in your handbag
• It has an inbuilt dictionary
• You turn the wireless on and it connects for new books in about 1 minute
• Books are cheaper than hard copies (some are even free–well $2 if you live in Australia)
• You will make heaps of new friends because everyone wants to have a go at the Kindle

Cons

• It takes a bit of getting used to–although it imitates a book well, you miss the feel of pages
• Turning a page has a slight delay
• You can’t lend books to people
• If it runs out of power you can’t use it
• Amazon (who make Kindle) has your credit card details linked to it so some weird malicious person could download heaps of unwanted books to your Kindle
• Not all books, especially recent best-sellers are available
• You can upload PDF documents from your computer (great for university papers)
• The screen saver burns into the screen temporarily (a bit like a plasma TV)

Some other issues for Australians are

• You need to charge it via a computer (I however connect mine via the USB to a USB enabled power-point–not sure if I should be doing this)
• There are no Australian authors available
• Aussies can’t access the blogs
• There are no Australian newspapers and magazines (and if you have travelled overseas you know how hard it is to get information about home–I need to know whether that idiot Kevin Rudd is going to continue with his mining tax, therefore devaluing the Aussie dollar even more)
• Aussies can’t get free books, there is a small charge
• You really need to keep an eye on the exchange rate. Stock up while the going is good as books could be more expensive than you bargained for
• There’s no colour images or text

I’ve loaded my Kindle up for when I go overseas next month. This is my book-list (wide and varied)

Classics

• Pride and Prejudice
• Little Women

Thrillers

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy
• The Wolf of Wall St
• The Third Twin

Romance (they only cost $2)

• Gravity vs the Girl
• Speed Dating
• Getting Rich, a Comic Novel

Epics (lots of pages–will take me ages to read)

• Windfall
• Wicked Pleasures

Self-help

• Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting (love this, read it every day)

Travel guides (although the maps can be a bit dodgy)

• Rick Steves Florence and Tuscany
• Rick Steves Cinque Terre
• Rick Steves Naples and Amalfi Coast (guess what country we’re going to?)

Baggage handlers and my luggage limit are rejoicing that about 7kg of books is reduced to one tiny little 300g thing that will slot into my handbag. See why I love it? I can pack more shoes. Also don’t be concerned that I’m going to spend my whole time reading–I read fast and there is that small matter of over 52 collective hours on a plane.

So will the Kindle replace books? Not in my world. I eat books for breakfast so it’s not really worth my while to buy the books I would usually borrow from my local library–it’s just too expensive and, as I mentioned, the new releases are often not available.

I guess if you look at the cons, they outweigh the pros, but not really because I think that having access to an unlimited amount of books, anywhere, anytime (just so long as you keep it charged) is the real clincher.

So , what books would you have on your Kindle?  Image