Ever since Amazon came out with the Kindle, I’ve been lusting for it.
For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s an e-reader, allowing you to purchase and download books (wirelessly!) to be read anytime, anywhere. It can hold up to about 1000 books, which makes it an ultra compact way to store your library, and super convenient if you travel and like to take along a book or ten.
It’s kind of pricey though. It’s dropped considerably since I started watching it, but it’s still an awful lot of money. As a big user of my local library (where the books are free!), I have had a hard time justifying the cost to myself. After all, it’s not just the cost of the Kindle itself, but then the cost to purchase all the books I want to read on it. So I’ve held off. But still I lust.
But you know what? I bought myself an iPhone in December. Which I adore, by the way. And as much as I do adore it, that’s not specifically what I want to tell you about. There is a free Kindle app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I downloaded it, and then downloaded a few free books to try it out. It seemed OK, but the free books weren’t really anything I was all that excited about reading. A friend passed along his copy of Stephen King’s new tome, “Under the Dome”, which I’ve been reading, but let me tell you, with my limited time for reading it is taking me a good bit of time to work through all 1074 pages. We were going away on vacation last week and I really wanted to bring along a book, but not one that’s 4 inches thick and weighs a few pounds. So I decided to buy the Kindle version of Mr. King’s latest.
Let me tell you – I absolutely loved reading it on the iPhone! I thought it would bother me to “turn the page” so often on the small iPhone screen, but it did not. I loved that I could bring along a huge book without the bulk and weight, and it remembers where you are when you leave the application to do something else. No bookmark to get lost or played with by little fingers!
I’m still lusting for that Kindle, but in the meantime, my free iPhone app is filling the bill quite nicely.
Niceties and Nasties from New England 