Amazon Kindle

It's here!  IT'S HERE!!!

Our new baby!  The 6" Kindle (with 3G and Wi-Fi) is here!!!  It came and I am so excited!!!

I'd been tracking it's progress and when I knew it'd be arriving this week, I really started powering through my existing 'book' book so that once it showed up, I could start fresh with a new Kindle book!

I will admit... I had been hesitant about the Kindle (or any e-reader for that matter).

El Hub has been asking me since February if I wanted one and I just kept being wishy-washy and saying "I dunno..."

Well he finally got so sick of my flip-flopping that he just went ahead and made the decision for me and ordered it!

I have (or had) my reasons for being unsure about it.

1. I love feeling books.  You know... those square papery things they still sell at Costco.  Nothing makes me happier than browsing books for hours at Barnes & Noble or the book section at Costco.  I love feeling them.  I love holding them.  I love the smell of the paper.  I was afraid I'd really miss that!
2. The Library... I grew up at the library.  I remember when I was little, my mom would take me all the time!  And we'd sit there, between the rows of books and the homeless people.  I loved it!!!  AND!  The city also had a Book-mobile!  I dunno if they still do that but I LOVED the book-mobile!  I just thought that was the most fascinating thing every!  I traveling library!  They'd stop at the local park by my house and my mom would walk me down there & let me pick out a few books to check out.  Loved It!  I hope such a thing still exists.
3. Do I really need another gadget.  Between the phone and the ipod (which I rarely use anymore as I am going a bit deaf... too much of the Rock 'n Roll...) and the laptop.  Did I/we need another techy gadget with wires and cables laying around the house?  Well to El Hub, the obvious answer was Yes.  :)  But I wasn't sure.  

Well... let me just say, I am over ALL of that! 

I quickly got 'over it' the day our new baby came!  :)

It is easy to hold.  I like being able to hold it with just my left hand and flip pages forward with my thumb (of my left hand) and the little 'forward' button.

It is easy to read.  I like that you can make the font bigger or smaller.  It seems that reading goes a bit quicker and is a bit more fluid as you don't think twice about flipping to the next page.  You just keep reading and before you know it, you've read so much!

I do like that the cute bright pink case El Hub got me for the Kindle comes with a light.  That has been a tough thing for us in that, if he wants to sleep and I want to read a book at night, I'd need to leave my bedside light on and he'd bury his head under the covers.

I am LOVING the definition feature!  I can't tell you how many times I've wondered what a word meant and was just too lazy to stop reading and go look it up.

I was able to learn 2 new words yesterday and continue reading my Chapter without even stopping or thinking twice about it!  That, for me is huge!

I am most excited about it being a space saver for us.  As much as I love having books around and I want our house to be a home of books, there are just so many you can keep and only so much space (at least for us) that we can give to our books! 

There are some books I'll NEVER part with (like my whole Anne of Green Gables series which I still have from when I was in the 8th grade) or my favorite Catcher in the Rye.

El Hub loves his computer books and I love my old Art History books from school.

But the rest just end up being big paperweights and space takers.  I have tried passing them along and they end up coming back!

Both my sis-n-law and my good friend Dianne are readers and I always pass my books along to them.  They read them and then they give them right back!

I have tried selling my books on Amazon and it's fine when they sell but when they don't, then they just sit here.  I recently sold a book and it had been the first time in like 4 months! (I'd actually forgotten that I even had a little Amazon 'book store').  :)

I was really getting to the point of just donating my books to the Library, which I'll most likely do with the books I have left to pass along.

I am really excited about the Kindle.  I read so much (about 1-2 books a month) that it just makes sense for us.

And everyone we know who has one, just loves it!  So that is good to know!

As I read it more, I'll let you know how I'm liking it and what I'm learning about it!  :)