Wireless Reading

While looking at one of my favorite sites to buy books, I found an advertisement for Amazon's Wireless Reading Device. Curiosity got the best of me and I clicked on the link to take a tour of their new device called the Kindle 2.

It is about the size of a small paperback book but thin as a credit card and only weighs in at 10.2 ounces. Most of the books I read are a lot heavier than that. Unfortunately for my pocketbook, the cost is just over $35 per ounce. All the controls to turn the pages, go Home or Back, or pull up menus are easily accessible. The full keyboard and 3G wireless access makes it a breeze to order more books, magazines, newspapers or visit blogs. It will hold up to 1500 titles.

Downloads are $9.99 or less and can be done in 60 seconds or less. This is much cheaper than most of the books I buy. One of my favorite authors is Stephen King and most of his books are hundreds of pages long and several inches thick. He has written a book just for Kindle called UR. If you turn the wireless off, the battery could last up to two weeks. Its text-to-speech feature is a big selling point for me because I check out a lot of books on tape from the library so I can "read" while I drive. The Kindle will let you switch back and forth from it "reading to you" or you sitting somewhere and reading from its display with 16 shades of grey and adjustable text size. For those of us that are getting older and may not carry our glasses all the time, this is a great feature. Now most cars don't have a cassette player in them and it's not that easy to find all the books on CD.

Connect the Kindle to your computer and you can download MP3 files to it so you can listen to your favorite music while reading. Since it has wireless, you can even email Word or PDF files. Amazon tries to have every book title available on their site and they have over 230,000 titles available for the Kindle. Whether you like to read books, magazines, newspapers, or blogs, the Kindle will be an asset. I just hope the price for this new and exciting technology comes down soon.