Why I Bought a Kindle
Written on July 18, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
I have been resisting the Kindle
But in spite of all these factors, I’ve still bought one. Why?
The fact is, I’m impatient. I’ve long seen the benefits of digital media. Indeed, I’ve even published books electronically myself. A decade ago, I owned a PalmOS device (a Handspring) on which I read a number of ebooks as well as kept track of appointments, played games, and so on. That device finally failed, and I didn’t replace it, so all the content I’d bought for it, while still in my computer’s archive folder, is essentially lost. Still, I did enjoy the handheld experience, and know I’ll use any ebook reader I finally acquire. There’s the practical issue of portability, too. My husband and I live in our motorhome nearly half the year, and there is just not enough room to carry all the books I’d like to have available in there.
But what about that iPhone I’ve written about so often? I’ve even written about the Kindle for iPhone app on this blog and I use it still. But as much as I love my iPhone, it is the case that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be (which never was that great), and these days I simply cannot read for long or as well on even as good a screen as the iPhone’s simply because of its small size. I find that although I have read entire books on it, I don’t retain as much sense from them as I want to. Also, the iPhone app doesn’t let me highlight blocks of text to refer to later. Yes, I can create bookmarks, but that’s not quite the same. Since I have bought some of my textbooks for grad school as ebooks, these are critical shortcomings.
In short, the
