This definitely falls under the For What It's Worth category, but I got a Kindle for Christmas. The smaller one, not the big DX that Amazon made available in Canada today.
And in short, I love it. This after cluelessly telling my wife that I didn't think I'd enjoy or use a Kindle when she e-mailed me right out of the blue before Christmas, after ordering my gift online, to ask me what I thought about the device.
I'm beginning to see just how irrelevant our prejudices about new technology really are. Books are wonderful partly because they have been an unchanging corner of our lives in a world that thrusts change on us every day. But anything that reassures us by being constant should also make us anxious, because there are no exceptions anymore -- everything is being transformed in the digital age.
My prejudices were the obvious ones: A book is a beautiful object that can't be improved on; the Kindle is a mere gadget; it represents a dumbing down of culture; it will irreparably damage the publishing industry; I can't display digital books on a shelf; it's a tablet and doesn't have two facing pages; books should be books!!
Fair enough. But really, the only problem I had with a Kindle before actually owning one is that it was ... different. That's it, that's all. Now that I'm used to it, I realize a Kindle does everything a book does, just not in the same way. Some of the differences are improvements, some not, and most are washes.
The things I love about the Kindle are:
The screen. This is not a computer; the screen is not backlit. In fact, it's not lit by anything other than your bedside lamp or by the warm sun coming through the living-room window. Somehow, every time you click on the "Next Page" button, the device reorganizes some kind of electronic ink into a new page of words and then leaves them there without requiring any power to do so. It's brilliant.
I can control the font size. This now strikes me as elemental. Why anyone should dictate to me the size of the words I'm reading seems ridiculous in the face of a device on which I decide what is and isn't comfortable for my middle-aged eyes. A bigger font can make for short pages, but so far this hasn't bothered me.
The Kindle is a reading device, period. Displaying content is all it does. The thing is brand new and it already has an old-school charm. I'm sure the other e-readers out there are the same, and good on them. I'm less upbeat about the Apple Tablet, which will be all Appley cool but will also do a million other things besides display book content. Who wants to be reading Wolf Hall and have "You have a new e-mail" pop up in the middle of the page? Maybe some people do, but not me. I love it that, when I'm off in the corner reading my Kindle, I get the same warm feeling of being at a remove from the world that books have always provided.
