Pedro is the author of The Insomniac Coder and is also Pedro Javier's dad. He is a web programmer and aspiring novelist stuck somewhere around the DC metropolitan area.
Reading or or two books per week can be a hassle when you own the books and you don’t take into account storage. Two books per week is over a hundred books a year. If each book is one inch thick, you are eating over 100 inches of bookshelf in just a year.
Now imagine that you are married, and your wife (14 years and going) also reads two books per week. Oh, and you live in a 1,000 square feet condominium. Where the hell are you going to store 14 years’ worth of books? Even if you re-read, it is still an insane amount of books, enough to convert a room into a library.
That only takes into account space. But what about organization? How the hell do you find a book that you want to re-read? Do you keep his and hers bookshelves? Alpha? By year? Genre?
Then there’s more: Upkeep: Books get dirty and attract bugs. You have to pull them out of the shelf every few months to make sure everything is clean. Who has time to do this for thousands of books? Also, books break. Paperbacks fall apart after the third or fourth re-read unless you are very careful. Over the years I have replaced every Tom Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin book that I have purchased at least twice. Sometimes I bought multiple copies of the same Clancy book.
When I learned about the Amazon Kindle, I was not blown over by the gadget appeal, the ease of read, electronic ink, etc. Those are nice things, but the one thing that I noticed on the spot is that it would solve many of my long term concerns:
Ivette reads as much as I do, so these issues benefit her too. I purchased our first Kindle in August, and I expect to pick up a second unit around Christmas.
The Kindle is far from perfect, but the current model shows the potential to turn into the iPod for books. If you compare the original iPod to the current iPod touch, the changes are mind boggling. That doesn’t make the original iPod a piece of shit, it still holds itself pretty well.
The Kindle is the same. It is an awesome piece of engineering, and if Amazon doesn’t drop the ball it is destined for greatness. The prepaid wireless connectivity is pure genius: the device costs more, but there is no monthly service fee. You can even surf the web with it, if you don’t mind the rudimentary browser.
Eventually people are going to write extra software for it. Amazon would be stupid to not plan for an open API, all they have to do is see how the iPhone and iPod Touch are doing.
So far I have purchased four books, and downloaded a ton of freebies. Purchasing has so far been painless, and I have never had to wait 5 minutes for the purchased book to show up in my Kindle. The longest book I have read so far was 1008 pages when it came out as a paperback, probably twice as heavy as the Kindle!
What I don’t like:
No show stoppers there. I am very happy with mine, and Ivette is looking forward to getting hers for Christmas.
