Kindle DX, Latest Generation...

I've been thinking of buying a Kindle for quite some time now.  Earlier models all had some deficiency or other that stopped me, but when the new Kindle DX came out I knew the time had finally come.  I ordered it, and it arrived on Thursday afternoon.

Just 48 hours later, I am completely and totally addicted.

First thing I did was to find a few books I've been wanting and ordered them.  The most expensive one was 40% off of the printed book price; the cheapest was over 75% off.  Finding the books and ordering them was very easy to do right from the Kindle.  It has a built in 3G (cell phone) that it uses to contact Amazon for this purpose.  It worked perfectly the very first time, with no setup required.  Amazon has done a magnificent job making the Kindle's technology transparent to the user.  You don't have to know anything at all about how it works in order to use it – you just point and click, and stuff happens.

Then I started exploring a bit, and discovered that there are many free (or nearly so) works of literature available.  These are books on which the copyright has expired, and they're now in the public domain.  Most of these were typed in by volunteers (such as from the Gutenberg Project).  I downloaded some of these in just a few minutes, and now my Kindle has things like The Wizard of Oz, the complete works of Charles Dickens, and Pride and Prejudice.  Wow!

But it gets even better, I discovered.  You can directly download eBooks from Project Gutenberg and other such eBook libraries, all free.  About thirty seconds after I read this page, I had a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on my Kindle. 

This is just amazing – this little device, the size and weight of a modest book (though much, much thinner), holds about 3,500 books that I can take anywhere.  Never again will I run out of reading material on a flight!  Or anywhere else...