Re: Re: Kindle Love ... Why Can't We All Just Get Along?!

Like Jon, I got a kindle for Christmas--but not from my wife (I don't have, and never will have, one of those), but from my parents. But like Brian, I was skeptical of kindles, and what they ultimately represent: the end of books.

I grew up in a home that was full of books. My father is a woodworker and as a child I helped him build our home library. I love being surrounded by books, and I love holding a book in my lap--flipping through its pages, reading it, and even marking it up. And like Brian, I like to take a snapshot of someone I don't know by looking at the books that person surrounds himself with.

That said, I think there are definitely some perks to having a kindle. For me, I like how small and manageable it is. I usually don't leave my apartment without carrying my laptop and other weighty items in a bag that sits on my beleaguered shoulder. Sometimes a book will literally double the weight of my bag, which is already too heavy as it is. Like right now, I'm reading Life by Keith Richards--on my kindle. Why? The book is huge! There's no way I'd be able to carry it around with me and read it on the subway and the bus, which is when I do a lot of my reading.

And here's another point: my friend and roommate works for a major publishing company in New York City. She's always got some interesting book-related tidbit up her sleeve. The latest one was this: many of the bestselling books on kindle are pop-novels. Think paperbacks by writers like Nora Roberts and Mary Higgins Clarke.  And I can understand that: those books aren't keepsakes the way a classic novel or a serious piece of non-fiction is. So if you don't want to build up a stockpile of, say, Nicholas Sparks books, then you can just read them on your kindle and be done with it.

Meanwhile, for those other books that are more meaningful--I hope to buck the kindle trend and buy them in hard copy, lest Brian comes to my place for a drink and concludes that I'm an illiterate philistine.