My Kindle

My eyes returned to normal and I've been playing with my Kindle 2. It's a fun toy for grown ups and bookworms! The Eldest has one too; we're going to use them on our upcoming European tour. I've been loading books onto mine; I have 2 novels and a travel guide book on it so far. I have to say that it's wonderful, but librarians and book stores don't have anything to fear at this point. A real book in hand is so much better than an electronic device. It will be fantastic when we travel since we can load so much onto one teeny tiny little thing, but for regular day to day reading give me an old fashioned paper and ink book. The Kindle 2 (K2) doesn't have color, first of all, so you literally can't judge your books by their covers. Secondly, it's hard to get an idea of the length of the book from the K2. You can't easily see how many pages it is or get a sense of how long it is, or even, when you're reading, how much more you have to read to the end of the chapter, let alone the end of the book. Then it still has glitches. I was reading one of the novels this morning and went to turn the page, but nothing happened. I pressed "next page" again and still nothing. I pressed "previous page" just to try something, and it flickered to a blank screen for a second before going back to the home page. When I went back into the novel it put me at the place I'd left off the night before, not where I was currently. ARGH! And it's difficult to FIND where you are when that happens. (Luckily the book was talking about a new character so I did a search on that name and found my spot.) You can read samples of the books before you buy them. I did that, but then I had to start over from the beginning when I downloaded the actual book since it doesn't sync up where the sample left off.

These are minor annoyances but I can deal with them for the sake of not having to cart 20 guide books, language dictionaries, phrase books, and several novels on our trip!