My eShopping List

"Excuse me."

I looked up from scowling at my Kindle Keyboard.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the little old lady said.

I smiled at her. "It's okay. Am I blocking your way?"

"I'm interested in electronics," she said.

"Oh! This is a Kindle, an ereader. Maybe you've seen them advertised on TV. This is an older model. I bought a $0.99 Notepad app to keep my shopping list on it. I have it organized by the aisles, but I put the Chex Mix in the wrong aisle and was moving it because I was several aisles down and had to come back to this one."

She came closer to see my screen.

"See? This list is reusable because I put a couple of dots, periods, in front of the item I want when I think of it, then when I put it in my cart, I delete the dots. It's a lot easier than using paper because if the store's out of something, I don't have to rewrite the item onto my next shopping list."

"How interesting," she said. "Thank you so much for showing me."

"You're welcome. I just wanted to keep those pieces of paper under control."

Purses & Kits

As forecast in my last post, I've been busy shopping for purses. I like the Baggallini line because they're lightweight and come in several attractive colors as well as the basic neutrals. Unfortunately, they tend to be smaller than the measurements stated on the website and hang tags.

For example, the Currency Organizer is .5" shorter making it difficult to impossible to store dollar bills flat in it depending on which pocket.

For that reason, the Triple Zip Bagg I first bought had to be set aside since it's too small to easily fit my Kindle Keyboard in it because the actual measurements are .75" shorter than the advertised measurements.

Settling on the Large Wallet Bagg for running errands, I chose the Hobo Tote for when I want to carry more such as a water bottle, camera, and monocular or binoculars. Since it's only a larger purse and not really a tote bag, I also bought an inexpensive, non-descript tote bag as well as a waistpack to complete my scheme of layering bags and kits.

So, this is how it stacks up:

My Large Wallet Bagg contains my micro survival kit.

My Hobo bag can hold my Large Wallet Bagg and my mini survival kit.

My tote bag can hold my Hobo bag and my small survival kit in its own waistpack with a belt pouch for my FAK and Clif bars.

When I go on a day hike, I'll use the small survival kit waistpack with a second belt pouch holding my GPSr, other incidentals, and my compass if it's not hanging from my neck.

My medium survival kit remains in the sustainment pouch ready to grab & go as my mobile survival kit whenever a friend invites me to go on a day or road trip.

I had to reorganize a bit to make each larger kit an expansion of the previous smaller kit to limit redundancy.

I love feeling organized!

Another Two Weeks Gone

First, my appreciation goes to all veterans for their service to our country. Thank you and all the best to you on Veterans Day!

In my last post, I mentioned an Audible book French language course waiting to be downloaded via Wi-Fi to my Kindle. I went to the library and downloaded it, but nothing was there although it said I was at the 100% point when I opened it. Oh, well. I didn't order it and don't care enough about it to contact Customer Service after having heard the sample.

I went ahead and ordered a Sansa Fuze by SanDisk because of the longer battery life compared to the Clip+ and Clip Zip and its ability to play videos. I immediately loaded it with my MP3 Bible and road trip mix as soon as it arrived and was charged. Plugging old mini speakers from a cassette recorder into the Fuze, I enjoyed listening to it while shopping for a couple of knives for my Preparedness kits.

Having decided on Benchmade knives more than a year ago because of the company's excellent reputation for high-quality knives, I decided it was time to settle on the models and placed my order on Monday.

For a sheath knife, I chose the Rant, model #515, drop point, plain edge, and am very pleased to have gotten it below retail price from a Marketplace Seller on Amazon. It should be delivered next week.

For a folder, I selected the model 511H2O Griptilian in orange so it's easy to spot, modified drop point, also plain edge, also below retail price, which arrived yesterday morning in excellent condition from Outfitter Country, a different Amazon Marketplace Seller. I really like how easy it is to open and how it feels in my hand. After attaching a wrist lanyard with a mini cord lock so it can't fall very far like in the movie, "127 Hours," I slipped it into my Mobile Survival Kit.

But, I keep taking it out to play with it, it's that nice.

Past Two Weeks

Time passed quickly these past two weeks. Between regular activities, thunder storms, working on my Mobile Survival Kit, trying to find sugar-free iodized table salt, checking out the 30 Kindle ebooks that were available for free yesterday only, and wondering what's going on with my Kindle and what to do about it, I forgot to blog until now.

About storms - I keep my laptop unplugged during lightning storms so it won't get zapped and save the battery for use in case of emergency. Although I have a surge protector, I prefer to ensure I'm safe rather than sorry.

Mobile Survival Kit - I have all but hand sanitizing and insect repellent wipes which won't much change the current weight (under 5 lbs.) and bulk (approx. 540 cu. in.). I'd like to trim it down further.

Kindle - nothing's actually wrong. In fact, several things are much better. One thing is now Kindle ebooks are available for borrowing from participating libraries. Another is that user-documents are archived.

My issue is in order to use the new features, there's an update for which I have to go to the library to use the Wi-Fi. Normally, that isn't a problem. What makes it an issue for me is that somehow, I have an Audible book, a foreign language course, also waiting to download via Wi-Fi. I'll get the Audible book, whether I want it or not, when I receive the Kindle update.

Since I did not order the book, it must be a gift. However, gift Kindle books are supposed to be announced by an email stating who is the gift-giver and allowing the recipient the opportunity to accept or exchange it for a gift card. I did not receive the email.

Because I have several foreign language courses on CDs and already used up 1 Gb on my Kindle, I'm reluctant to receive the Audible book. As a result, I decided to try the sample only to discover to my dismay that the sample is also too large to be delivered except by Wi-Fi to my Kindle, not that I thought to try to request the sample be delivered to my PC in the first place.

At this point, I'm thinking I'll have to call Customer Service. But, wait! Look, there's a shiny thing!

What if I finally buy an MP3 player? I could put the Audible book on it thereby saving space on my Kindle and retrieve Kindle space by deleting the MP3 Bible's New Testament in favor of putting the entire Bible on the player.

So, I started shopping. I really like the idea of SanDisk's expansion SD slot because it means I can have my entire music collection, all my foreign language courses, the entire MP3 Bible, plus any Audible books I may acquire with me, conveniently, at all times wherever I may go. All I have to do is decide whether to buy a Fuze, Clip+, or Clip Zip and figure out how to write to an SD card from my laptop which doesn't have an SD card slot. I would probably have to take it to a computer shop for the transfer service or buy something external to do it myself.

Book Pricing

When I went to the store last week, I was pleased to find "The Brass Verdict" by Michael Connelly back on the shelf and displeased to find it US$2.00 more than in February.

Still, the $7.44 price is less than the cover price of $9.99 which was two dollars less than the ebook price of $11.99, now up to $12.99, which is why I wanted to buy the paperback instead of the ebook. It's simple economics.

What I don't understand is why the publisher wants more money for the ebook than for the paperback instead of less since no trees are killed in the making of ebooks and no oil is consumed to truck ebooks to the distribution points of sale.

One might assume that the publisher is taking advantage of ebooks to cash in on their rising popularity. It isn't only Connelly's publisher that's doing it because I've seen higher prices for the ebook version of other best-selling titles, too. Even the typical $9.99 is too much for an ebook because it costs so much less to make and distribute compared to a paperback.

One might also deduce that by pricing ebooks higher than paperbacks and releasing ebooks several weeks after books printed on paper, publishers are trying to retain their traditional control over authors' works by discouraging readers from buying ebooks through delayed availability and over-pricing.

Once an author realizes that s/he can receive more money from a self-published ebook or print-on-demand contract than through a traditional publisher which takes approximately 52% of the price of the book, there might not be enough incentive for an author to try for the traditional route. Already, publishers are experiencing the desertion of writers, although not yet in the droves one may expect due to the lingering stigma of the vanity press.

The advantage for readers is that with traditional publishers losing control over the writers who are going for independent publication, they're also losing control over what is available for readers to read. Censorship by editors rejecting manuscripts solely because of personal bias, such as the editor who rejected a novel containing capital punishment only because she is opposed to capital punishment, is being eliminated by authors bypassing the traditional publishing houses in favor of the independent route. This makes the digital revolution the best expression of freedom of the press we've yet to experience.

What's surprising to me is how traditional publishers are fighting against and trying to resist the inevitable change after seeing how newspapers have declined and blogs have flourished instead of trying to figure out how to work with the transition for everyone's benefit. It's always difficult for those in power to step back and give up even a little of their power when the normal attitude is to gain even more power.

These certainly are interesting times.

Kindle Games on Sale

In case you didn't know, beside reading material, there are games to play on the Kindle when we want a break from reading including a variety of Sudoku games and New York Times crossword puzzles plus free games like Blackjack, Every Word, Mine Sweeper, Shuffled Row, and Video Poker. Occasionally, some of the games go on sale which is, of course, the best time to get them. At this time, several games are available until March 27 for only US$0.99. Unfortunately, some are not available to residents outside the U.S.

So far, the games I enjoy most are:

Maze A Thon (regular price $0.99)

Slingo (regular price $3.99) and

Solitaire (regular price $3.99).

This week, I picked up:

Chess (regular price $2.99)

Hangman 4 Kids (regular price $1.99)

Mahjong Solitaire (regular price $3.99)

Scrabble (regular price $4.99) and

Texas Hold'em (regular price $3.99)

saving nearly $13 off the regular prices. Score!

Score your own by checking out your favorite games or find new ones you might enjoy while the sale lasts.

Free MP3 Bible

A couple of years ago, I downloaded the book of Jude from the Firefighters for Christ which offers a free MP3 KJV Bible, read by Stephen Johnston, as part of their ministry for those who want it on their computers or MP3 players.

I downloaded it to see if it's like my Bible on cassette (it is) because I like Stephen Johnston's narration with faint background music between the chapters and books better than Alexander Scourby's narration with no background music of my CD Bible. I forgot about it because I've been waiting to buy an MP3 player when I really need one. Finding Jude on my laptop while looking for an MP3 file to try out on my Kindle, I realized that maybe I didn't need to buy the TTS Bible.

However, since the complete MP3 Bible is 1.1 GB, and since the Kindle's 3 GB is shared by ebooks, magazines, Audible files, MP3 files, and personal documents, the MP3 Bible may be larger than anyone might want to keep on a Kindle.

Fortunately, individual books may also be downloaded.

As a result, I downloaded the New Testament, 231 MB, one book at a time during last month's snow storms and am enjoying it on my Kindle. An important point I learned in the process is that everything has to be moved to the Kindle at one time to keep everything in order. When I transferred another book later, it didn't get appended to the end but was inserted somewhere else, chapters straying at random.

I'm thinking about transferring the entire Old Testament to my Kindle as well because I can always delete ebooks I've read and restore them from my Kindle Archive.

Also, I can free up Kindle space by deleting the MP3 Bible after I get an MP3 player. I think I still need to get an MP3 player eventually because I have over 15 GB of music on my laptop and don't like having to hook it up and turn it on just for music on the road. My road trip mix folder alone is over 6 GB.

Last week during my day trip to lunch with my friend, I tried listening to my Kindle but found it too soft for the ambient road noise. Fortunately, I also took along the cassette adapter from my Sony Discman. Setting the Kindle's volume to the max enabled me to listen to the New Testament through my car speakers just fine.

As usual with no buttons being pushed to keep my Kindle awake, the screen went into Sleep mode but the audio kept playing. After reaching my destination, I slid the power switch to awaken the Kindle and turned the audio off by pressing Alt + Space before powering the Kindle off. Tucking the unit into its case then into my handbag, I headed into the restaurant and had a great visit with my friend.

My Kindle's turning out to be everything I hoped it would be.

Snow Days

Now that the worst of the snow days have passed, it's time for a recap.

Since I checked my emergency food kit last fall and had plenty of groceries for regular daily use, the day before the big storm hit two weeks ago, I looked for what last minute items I'd need to see me through the rest of the week and, not needing anything, decided to be snowed in with a pan pizza from Pizza Hut. The pizza lasted two days.

Although I stayed in for the most part, there were a few times that I went outside just to get out. I've never had problems in fresh snow, but after it melts and refreezes overnight, walking gets dicey. I easily pulled the YakTrax Walkers onto my rain boots for the first time since I bought them in 2009 and really like how they bit into the icy snow and secured my footing. My appreciation tripled after hearing another woman slipped and fell, breaking a leg in two places. She's due to have surgery next week.

After the roads were cleared of the worst, I went to buy a few perishables such as bread, cheese, and bananas. Either I was too early and the store hadn't been restocked or other customers had already purchased the same items I wanted preparatory to the following week's snow storm that turned out to be a lot milder. I lucked out on bread probably only because I wanted wheat; all the white bread was gone.

Another store had bananas so green, I decided to buy grapes instead.

While unloading my few groceries, I visited with a woman who said she and her sister went to the store to stock up the day before the big snow storm hit and found it such a madhouse, they put their children in the shopping carts to protect them from the other customers' pushing and shoving. She said all the bottled water was gone.

I gave my report and was secretly glad I was able to skip buying groceries until after the big storm when the store was a lot calmer.

Being prepared is well worth it!

The only glitch was that a book I want to read is more expensive as an ebook than as a discounted paperback. Since buying the paperback was a spur-of-the-moment impulse, and I wasn't sure of the title, I didn't get it thinking there were enough copies on the rack for me to get it when I returned after the next snow storm if it was the one I hadn't yet read.

Surprise, surprise! Not only was "The Brass Verdict" by Michael Connelly completely sold out when I returned after last week's snow storm, there was only one copy of his "Nine Dragons" left. Obviously, other people had the same idea about reading through the snow storms that I had.

I passed the time during the snow storms and waiting for the roads to reopen by watching TV, downloading an MP3 Bible, reading several ebooks including "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables" and playing Solitaire on my Kindle.

TTS

For this week's blog post, I was going to write about the Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature of the Kindle.

I was going to point out that whether the feature is enabled or not is up to the publisher of the ebook.

I was going to highlight the choice of a male or female voice that may be adjusted to speak faster or slower than the default setting.

I was going to mention it's a bit mechanical sounding, compared to a real person reading aloud, but it's a minor limitation of the Kindle 3 that doesn't bother me.

I was going to say that because my car has a cassette player, I can use my portable CD player's cassette adapter to listen to an ebook or a few MP3 files on my Kindle through my car speakers while I drive.

I was going to blog about how I enjoy listening to scripture at home and on the road and that long road trips killed several of my Bible cassettes through the years. Changing over to a Bible on CD and taking along a CD player means more clutter in my car. Anticipating the purchase of an MP3 player and having to find an MP3 Bible to play, I was going to rave about how very happy I am to have found OSNOVA's TTS-friendly KJV Bible for only $4.99.

I was going to write that, unlike my other ebook Bible, the speech is very easy to follow either listening or reading along because the verse numbers were removed and the text set in normal paragraphs.

I was going to mention that since I bought this TTS-friendly Bible for listening purposes, sometimes I forget that the speech function has to be stopped in order to use the Next Page/Last Page buttons or the 5-way controller arrows to skip forward or back to another book. I was going to add that using the Shift and Sym keys makes it easy to toggle the speech off and on again.

I was also going to post that for the low cost, ease of use, and convenience of not having to pack everything I used to and considering I can use it at home, too, the TTS feature on the Kindle and this TTS-friendly Bible are real blessings.

But I decided to get a rotisserie chicken and seedless grapes for dinner and read another ebook, instead.

Romans 10:17. So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

More Retail Therapy (Score!)

This isn't the same as my previous experience in the candy store.

I had obtained free ebooks of Aesop's Fables and the complete works of William Shakespeare and Mark Twain (counted as one book apiece), discovering it extremely difficult to locate what I want within them because there aren't active links to make it easy for me to go from the Table of Contents (TOC) to what I want to read. If it wasn't the first piece, because I don't know the location, I'm supposed to repeatedly press the Page Forward button which quickly exceeds the limit of my patience.

Therefore, I spent several hours over several days comparing various ebook samples to find those I was willing to buy. My main criteria are the ease of using the interactive TOC and the formatting especially for Shakespeare since weird line breaks in his plays and poetry could make for awkward reading. Also, too much white space is annoying.

A few customer reviews complained about nasty line breaks with the publisher responding with a recommendation to set the font size down to 1 or 2 from the larger default size 4.

They're both nuts since the Kindle may be rotated to make the screen horizontal instead of vertical, effectively eliminating the line break issue without having to shrink the font size.

In the end, I bought the complete works of Honore de Balzac (150+ works), Charles Dickens (200+ works), William Shakespeare (38 plays, 154 sonnets, 5 poems), Mark Twain (14 novels + short stories, essays, and non-fiction), an illustrated Aesop's Fables, and all 16 volumes of Sir Richard F. Burton's translation of "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night" (aka the 1001 Arabian Nights).

Imagine, 42 novels plus plays, short stories, essays, and more for only $12.05. The hardback book of Shakespeare's complete works alone costs over $25 and it's so darned heavy, I can't imagine taking it traveling.

Score!

Paint Job

My love affair with my Kindle continues.

Examining my keypad, I noticed that the arrows on the five-way controller as well as the letters E, T, I, O, A, H, L, and the arrow on the shift key are starting to fade. Since I was aware this happens on some graphite units, not the white units, before I bought my Kindle and bought it anyway, it doesn't bother me.

Following the advice of others who didn't want to return their Kindles for this mild cosmetic issue, I painted all my keys with clear nail protector after removing the excess fluid from the brush. One woman wrote that she used a toothpick instead of the brush that came with her clear nail polish to make sure none of her polish would overflow the buttons and ruin her Kindle.

Losing the arrows on the five-way controller isn't anything to me, but I'm not so good a typist, much less a thumb-typist, that I can afford to lose the letters. I plan to repaint when the shine wears off to ensure the letters remain as long as possible.

Retail Therapy

I feel like a kid in a candy store, grabbing handfuls of whatever I want.

Since I received my Kindle a month ago, I've shopped until I dropped looking mostly for free ebook versions of the classics I've wanted to read as well as those I want to reread discovering in the process that "The Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas is the first book of a trilogy and that the old Errol Flynn swash-buckling movies, "Captain Blood" and "The Sea Hawk," were made from books by Rafael Sabatini who had other international best-sellers.

I've been reading what I've been downloading, too. "My Man Jeeves" by P.G. Wodehouse, "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane are a few of the 17 books I've read so far of the nearly 260 ebooks I've acquired.

Yup, two hundred sixty. It's "nearly" since one is the Kindle User's Guide.

Under typical retail therapy, at an average of $5 each if I was lucky, 260 books would cost me half a fortune ($1300) and fill several bookcases.

Practicing the ebook version of retail therapy, I spent $32.74 for six books: one Bible, two novels, four references; and was surprised that the 260 ebooks left 2.7 GB free out of the 3 GB available on my Kindle.

What else can I say?

<Happy dance!>

For Holiday Shoppers

For those of you still considering what to get the bookworms on your holiday gift list or if you're licking your chops anticipating what you might buy yourself with the gift money you receive, here's some information about ebook reading devices. If you need only a stocking stuffer, Book Darts has Christmas specials.

This CNET article, updated last month, compares Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and Apple's iPad with mentions of other e-readers, including the Sony Readers, to give you an idea of what's out there and their features. It says they're available at Best Buy if you want to see them in person without driving thither and yon.

As may be expected, the Nook is also available at Barnes & Noble with the iPad at an Apple store. Amazon's Kindle is also available at Staples and Target. Sony Readers are also available at Borders, Costco, and Fry's. Kobo eReaders are available at Borders and the new wireless Kobo Wi-Fi eReader is available at Wal-Mart stores in black only.

Four things you might want to know:

1. The Nook's touted LendMe feature lets you loan your ebooks to friends. However, it depends on the publisher and, if allowed, permits loaning only one book to one friend for only 14 days. You can't read it while it's loaned out. You can't loan it out again.

[Update: Amazon released this feature for the Kindle on Dec. 30, 2010 with the same limitations.]

2. If you've been borrowing books from your local public library and think getting an e-reader will significantly decrease the length of time you'll have to wait to read current popular fiction, don't count on it. I read a report of how libraries have ebooks in the EPUB format, but because publishers are concerned about decreased sales if libraries loan ebooks, there's a restriction making borrowing an ebook comparable to borrowing a hardcopy or worse. As a result, the author had to wait 18 weeks before getting the ebook he wanted to read on his Nook.

3. The Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Sony Reader all use E Ink technology. However, at this time, only the Kindle and Sony Reader Touch are using the latest E Ink Pearl displays.

4. The Kobo eReader battery is not replaceable.

For comparison purposes, e-reader user guides are available for the Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Sony Reader.

Try before you buy or avoid buying an e-reader because you already have something that will do - free apps for ebook reading devices such as the Android, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone/iTouch, Mac, PC, and Windows Phone 7 are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

(Note: All devices are not supported by every bookseller and the free app may not have every feature that is available on the corresponding e-reader.)

I <3 My Kindle

Finishing my Christmas shopping last Friday, my thoughts dwelt on how convenient Amazon's Kindle would be for me at home apart from its being a travel accessory.

1. Although I've enjoyed reading free ebooks on my laptop courtesy of the free Kindle for PC application, reading at bedtime makes my laptop magically grow progressively larger and heavier as I get sleepier, shrinking back to its regular size and weight before I awake. Being able to switch from my laptop at any point in a book to the much smaller and lighter Kindle would enable me to continue reading until I'm ready to nod off.

2. Checking Amazon for five books I bought this year, I saw that Kindle editions are available for all of them at a lesser price, one for free. Not only would it save me money, it would greatly decrease the amount of space I need for storing books at home. Sure, I'm a great fan of public libraries even while traveling, but there are books I just have to own. Of course, I can store more ebooks on my laptop, but see #1 above.

3. The Kindle has a Text-to-Speech feature that, depending on a publisher's allowing it to be enabled which may be determined on Amazon's description for the book, allows me to listen to an ebook when I want to rest my eyes like being read a bedtime story as a child. This feature is not available in the PC app. For road trips, I can plug my cassette adapter into the headphone jack, insert the adapter into my car's cassette player, and by turning Text-to-Speech on, listen to a book as I drive as if it's an audio book.

4. Another feature not available with the PC app is the ability to organize ebooks into folders, called Collections. Kindle for PC sorts by author, title, most recent, or by file size making quite a list for me to go through to find what I want out of the already 99 ebooks in my library. Being able to go to a Collection will greatly relieve me of the annoyance of not being able to quickly find something I know I have. Because ebooks may be categorized in more than one Collection, there's less chance of my not being able to find what I want due to forgetting in which Collection I categorized it.

As a result, after reading the 1-star and 2-star negative reviews on Amazon that did not put me off in the slightest, I ordered a Kindle last Friday, Dec. 4, at nearly 6 P.M. ET along with a neoprene case by Belkin. Assured they would be delivered Dec. 10-14, continuing to read on my magical laptop (see #1 above), I found waiting to be as hard on me as waiting for Christmas Day when I was a child.

Amazon and United Parcel Service must have really gotten their acts together for the holiday season. Despite my ordering after normal business hours on a Friday, considering the weekend and that I selected free shipping which usually takes a few days longer than the paid-for standard shipping, my Kindle arrived on Tuesday morning, shipped from Lexington, Kentucky. Remembering one Amazon shipment originating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas that drove me crazy watching it spend three days going from one UPS distribution center to another before it left the state of TX, I was determined to not monitor the tracking status for my Kindle during the six to ten days it was supposed to take to arrive. Surprised by the fast delivery, I was jumping in joy.

Having read the PDF User's Guide through the Kindle for PC app over the weekend, I unpacked the box and plugged in my Kindle to charge.

Noticing the indicator light changed from orange to green two to three hours later, I eagerly turned it on, registered it to my Amazon account, downloaded and synchronized my library, then tried out a few features before organizing my ebooks into Collections.

(The instructions said I wouldn't have to register it if I bought it through my Amazon account, which I did, because it would already be registered, which it wasn't. No matter. Registration was fast and easy, taking only a moment.)

I'm not reading ebooks on my laptop, anymore.

Imagine reading that's much easier on your eyes than using a backlit screen.

Imagine electronic paper and ink technology that's easier to read than paperback and some hardback books.

Imagine having nearly a hundred books, with room for up to 3,500 books, in a device that can be held in one hand, either hand, that's thinner and weighs less than two ounces more than a giant (6.8 oz/192 g) bar of Hershey's red Symphony chocolate.

Imagine being able to access any of your ebooks at any time with only a few clicks of a thumb or finger without having to move from your chair.

Imagine being able to turn pages with a slight movement of your thumb on the same hand holding the Kindle.

(Picture how not having to lift a finger to turn a page, much less an arm or hand, deepens the meaning of the term "couch potato.")

Since it arrived Tuesday morning, I've spent about ten hours reading on it and I love my Kindle. I really love it!

Praise the Lord!

Correction

In my last post, I wrote that the dictionary feature doesn't work in the Kindle for PC app. I was wrong. The reason it didn't work for me was because I wasn't online as I should have been to let the dictionary download the first time I tried to use it. After it downloads, it works just fine without my needing to be connected.

I edited my previous post to remove my erroneous observation.

Score! (Kindle for PC)

Always on the lookout for ideas to make traveling easier for me, recent television commercials for Amazon's Kindle got me thinking how nice it would be to have a single ebook reader when I go to Europe one of these days instead of packing travel guides, phrase books, and reading material for flights and long train rides.

Checking the features and reading the reviews for the latest version of the Kindle, the only thing I didn't like is that when the non-user-replaceable battery has to be replaced, customers have to send the unit back. After it's returned with a new battery, users have to download their libraries all over again. Since Amazon stores a backup copy of the user's library, bookmarks, highlighting, and notes, the inconvenience is only a matter of time unless there's a glitch somewhere that causes the loss of some books. However, users are able to download to a PC and save to a hard drive or other media, so it's easy enough to make your own backup of your library of ebooks and magazines which you should do anyway if you want to save all your magazines.

Seeing that the Kindle can read free ebooks from other sources as well, such as those from the Gutenberg Project, I decided to download the free Kindle for PC application along with several free ebooks to try out on my laptop. I have already finished reading two of my free ebooks and am very pleased.

In addition to the Kindle for PC app, other free Kindle apps are available for the Android Phone, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, and Mac. With the iPhone app, you may also read Kindle books on the iPod Touch.

As a result, when I'm ready to travel to Europe, I plan to buy a Kindle to keep my load down. Looking at the two piles of books next to me, maybe I should get one sooner. After all, it is a whole lot less expensive than an iPad and according to KindleTruth.com, it has a lot of nice features that make it better for reading than an iPad.

Whether I get a Kindle right away or not, free app + free ebooks - the inconvenience of going to a library or buying from a regular book store = Score!