Kindle

My Kindle came in from Amazon.com yesterday. I had already purchased 80 or so Ebooks to try out on it. Most are older science fiction that are very tough to find today. Out of print etc. I also subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. I have always enjoyed reading the Journal in the morning, but usually found the hassle and waste of throwing away the paper too much. Same for Time Magazine. Now no more paper to throw away but I can still read the Journal every morning. Very nice.

I have also found some of the older Science fiction is the actual pulp version from astounding. Apparently these were scanned to make the ebook version. Reading the original Skylark stories and seeing the pulp drawings from the original astounding articles is very cool.

I also like the fact that I have 80 books with me in a device the size of a paperback book. Much more portable then a laptop. I will probably start purchasing all the new books I want this way. The price on a new hard bound bestseller for example is only $10 vs the $30 or $40 I would normally pay. I picked up Churchill's History of world war II for about $6 bucks a book. I have the collectors version setting on my book shelf, but it does take up most of a shelf :-).

A primary motivator for me to buy the kindle was I was running out of book shelf space. The garage is full on both walls, there is a wall full in the living room, a wall full in both bedrooms. I only have about 1.5 shelves free so I am being careful about what books I buy. Now with the Kindle I will buy them first in Kindle format and then buy the hard backs only when I want collector versions.

I figure this will both save me shelf space and money. In addition I will start trying to buy most of my technical books in Kindle format. These usually are only useful for about 2 years before they are obsolete so at least now I won't have obsolete books taking up shelf space. The only thing I might miss is the source CD's but those are usually online any way. I probably spent a good $1K on this beast between the Kindle for $400 and the 80+ books. So far it looks to have been very well worth it.

I plugged my 1 Gig SD card into it. I had this in my old windows mobile phone but my new phone could not use it. It had to be a mini sd card. So the new windows mobile phone now has a 4 Gig mini sd card in it while the Kindle has another gig of memory for books. I figure that is some where around 1200 books I can carry around in the Kindle before I will have to upgrade to a 4 gig card or something. Of course by that time the kindle will be out of date and I will buy a new one :-)