Kindle...again.

As a sort of birthday gift for my wife and anniversary present for both of us, I bought the latest Kindle last June. This is the 8x11 page sucker. It looks like a full sized notebook, compared to the original Kindle which looks like a PDA on steroids.

As I say, I bought it in late June. My wife has downloaded a lot of novel excerpts and one novel. I downloaded the memoirs of U.S. Grant because it was public domain (99 cents) and I'd read it was one of the more readable presidential memoirs. I can say that Grant did not load up the narrative with dense vocabulary, and if I only had the Kindle next to me in the room where I park at night and watch TV, I might have finished the memoir. I also ordered the New Yorker via Kindle. It does an adequate job with the cover (it's a WSJ type display, no colors) and okay with the cartoons. I admit the learning curve on navigating the TOC is steeper than I'd expected (again, if I were using it more frequently this would probably be a nonissue), but the bottom line with the Kindle is that I don't pick it up as often as I'd thought.

It's not too heavy, and the display isn't bad. It's certainly portable enough - yes, I've read it on the hopper. It's not at all hard to back up a page on the Kindle, the response time is probably faster than the time it takes me to flip through print pages... why is it so hard to say this? I like books.

In part my slow adoption of the Kindle is that many of the books I want to read are not yet available electronically. I most often purchase used books by authors I've discovered (whose titles may be ten or more years old) and these titles have not been set up for Kindles. I spend more on shipping than on the books.

So in ten years, if titles are retrospectively set up for the Kindle, I may be carrying a battered electronic reader around...maybe. By comparison I was hopelessly addicted to my first Ipod within three months... and I now watch more flicks via Netflix download than DVD, so I'm not the slowest of adopters.

I wonder which is the greatest burden on the environment, print books or the energy required to run a Kindle? I haven't seen any statistics I trust either way...

Ebooks...

I was surprised to read in a post on Publisher's Weekly that an industry study negates the popular assumption that ebook sales eat into the print market. Ebooks - particularly etextbooks - were heavily used, but didn't impact print sales. That's good news and bad news. For the promoters of the Kindle, saving trees is a big selling point. But the ebook reader won't necessarily save any trees... instead, there's the additional kilowatts (perhaps just watts) the readers will require. That technically adds to the electrical power we need to generate... so ebooks are hypothetically more convenient (how's the Kindle going to handle getting dropped in sand?), no improvement on saving trees, and another damn battery operated appliance.

So what's the upside? Another gadget, something else to buy. Hmm... do I sense another addition to the junkpile of history where now resides the 8-track tape player?