My new Kindle 2

I got my Kindle 2 last night. Boy is that thing thin! I was impressed with how light it is too. Loki climbed up in my lap while I was reading, and it wasn't hard at all to pet him with one hand and hold the book, turn pages, and read while petting him. YAY!

I have a kazillion samples on my kindle that I selected through Amazon.com while I was waiting. About a quarter of them I've already read and I just wanted to see how having them on the kindle compared. I can certainly see spending all of my fun money on books for a while.

I did have one full book that I bought: Twilight by what's her name. My BBF loved the series, and told me that the lead character Bella was reminiscent of me, or perhaps of the me I am when I'm writing characters (there's something familiar about her anyway, neither of us can put our fingers on it). I'm about half way through- I only had around two hours of reading time since I had to go to sleep and all.

I am a voracious reader, so the Kindle (where hardcover new releases are something like ten bucks, maybe twelve) should prove to be a money saver in the long run. Of course not right away- the device is pretty expensive. But figure that I probably spend around the same amount in a year on books, and within two or three years I'll have made up my upfront costs. What's more, the kindle is a space saver.

If you live in NYC, you're going to have to put up with less space. I have four boxes of books in our storage nook in the basement, and two bookshelves in our apartment, plus a good dozen or so books floating around with no particular place to be (these are in constant rotation with the books on the shelves). I reread a lot of my favorites. So I don't want to give away my books (unless I really don't think I'll read them again- I donated something like a hundred to the classroom I taught in because I didn't see me rereading the young adult literature collection I'd accumulated). The kindle is my own personal library, with remote storage and easy retrieval from that storage for the books I've already read. I think any NYer who loves to read should consider a kindle. I wish they'd had this years ago when I was in school- can you imagine not having to lug around a huge back pack? Hopefully by the time I have kids in school, each child will get an ereader of some sort instead of having to tote such heavy bags.