Last weekend when we went to Florida I still had a couple hundred pages of “Outlander” to read, so I took the book along, not figuring I would finish it. Well, by mid morning Saturday I had. Facing the all day drive home on Sunday (half of which would be spent in the passenger seat) without anything to read, I asked if they had a used bookstore nearby. BIL Paul said, “You like science fiction, right?” “Sure”, I said. “You can borrow one of my Kindles, I have plenty of books on it.”
Every since Kindles arrived on the scene 5 or 6 years ago I have been curious to see what the reading experience would be like as compared to a physical book. And actually, in the intervening years at birthday or Christmas time when Donna would ask what I’d like as a gift, the thought of buying one would pop up, but I never pulled the trigger though, as I saw no real need.
Up until now my book reading needs have been taken care of by weekly (or so) visits to the local used book store, an occasional visit to the Book Warehouse in Savannah to get last year’s off-lease library hardcover books and the rare current bestseller picked up at Books-A-Million or Barnes & Noble.
That local used book store recently closed down, so the $1.99 and deeply discounted eBooks available for the Kindle could possibly replace that, but owning one of those things would never be able to totally replace the second two of those spots because there is something about holding a physical book and visiting their physical stores that cannot be replicated digitally. Best I can describe it; to me it is like the difference of driving the automatic transmissioned Sonata compared to the Miata’s manual transmission with a clutch, there is more of a connection.
The availability of all the free books out there for the Kindle are no interest to me, as most of them consist of the “classics”, or better known as the books they tried unsuccessfully to get me to read and appreciate in high school. There is one place where they do have free eBooks that I might be interested in…the library. The Aiken Regional library loans ’em out. This is cool for a couple reasons, you never have to worry about losing a book (you may lose the Kindle, but the book isn’t really in there) and no late fees (you can’t forget to return it; they just electronically yank it back.)
Paul’s second generation Kindle with the leather cover gives a pretty good approximation weight-wise of holding a nice hard cover book and the smaller than a page screen size means there is more page “turning”, but the buttons to accomplish that fall easy to your fingers while holding the “book.” While I didn’t think I’d hate using a Kindle, I didn’t think I would like it as much as I do. My birthday is next month and when Donna asks this time, I’ll more than likely buy one.
