Friday, April 10, 2009

I loves my Kindle :-)


An introductory disclaimer: I do not sell Kindles. I do not work for Amazon. I am not affiliated with Amazon in any way or manner. Nobody has offered me any incentives to promote my enthusiasm for the Kindle. My love for it is one of the most disinterested and sincere emotions I have ever experienced.

It will soon be a year since I first held my Kindle in my hands. When I first found out about it on Amazon, I wasn't sure whether I wanted it. No electronic reading device can substitute the feel, the smell, and the texture of a real book, I thought. Little did I know that a couple of months later I would be ready to inflict grave bodily harm on anyone who would dare to refer to my Kindle as "an electronic reading device" or, even worse, "a gadget."

It is the most amazing thing ever. It allows you to carry all of your books, dictionaries, articles, newspapers, magazines, and blogs with you wherever you go. It weighs next to nothing. It allows you to subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. It has a free Internet connection. You can buy books directly from Amazon or upload all of the free content from the Internet (Project Gutenberg, Instituto Cervantes, etc.) Version 1 of the Kindle allows you to insert memory cards, which makes the number of books you can carry with you absolutely limitless. If you decide at 2 a.m. that you want to read or sample a particular book, you don't have to wait for the library or the bookstore to open. You can start reading it in matter of seconds. And, in all probability, it will be cheaper than at the bookstore. When a new book by your favorite author comes out, you don't have to wait until it appears in paperback (I mean, what kind of a maniac can afford to buy hardcover editions?) or try to read it in the bookstore. All new books cost lest than $10.

You can look words up in the dictionary right from the page you are reading. You can highlight passages and write your own comments. And as if that weren't enough, it automatically places everything you highlighted into a separate file. Then, you can just copy-paste the quotes you need into your own article or essay. And it always remembers your page.

Best of all, you will never be stuck anywhere without reading matter. I've been looking for some downside of using the Kindle. But as of now, I just can't see any.

No comments: