Me and My Kindle

I'm sick. 

No really.  I have bronchitis.  The thing about this sickness is that I feel almost fine when I'm lying in bed sipping tea and watching YouTube videos about The Canterbury Tales.  The moment I get up however, I feel dizzy, and I start to cough.  After awhile of moving around, I get all achy and blah blah blah.  Anyway! The point is I've been catching up on my Jon Stewart and I caught an interview which has sold me on my next read, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and some other guy. 

The big question is whether I should download it to my Kindle, or buy a hard copy, which I can then release via Bookcrossing.  While it is fun to share books through bookcrossing, I think I have enough physical books to pass on at the moment.  I have boxes sitting in storage full of books, my bookshelves are crammed to overflowing, and I have an unsightly stack of books on the floor by my desk.  It's embarrassing, I admit.  I even bought more (used) books over the weekend, (before I got sick) and am slowly working my way through them as I recover.  Those used books will definitely be going on the bookcrossing shelf once I'm done with them. 

Another knock against the Kindle is the fact that the digital copies of books that I download to my Kindle are only readable on the Kindle.  It has been suggested that a more equitable exchange would be to have e-books made available that can be read on multiple devices in one standard format.  If that happens, my precious Kindle may go the way of Betamax and DiVX.  One could argue that I might stop investing (so to speak) in Kindle titles and buy low-tech printed books until this format thing gets settled.

But I figure, why buy a device and then get cheap when it comes to buying content for that device? Who owns a PS3 and only buys one game for it? Besides someone with a gamefly account, obviously.  I'm thinking, as much as I love books, how often do I get to reread them? Well, it depends on the book, obviously.   But the point is that most books that I read, I only get to read once, and then they live on a shelf or get sold on Amazon or passed on to a friend.  So, I'm not worrying about the Kindle thing.  If it becomes obsolete, I'll just rebuy the books in another format.  In the meantime, I'll continue to whip it out it bars and on the bus, and then happily explain its many features to whoever turns to me and asks, "Excuse me, is that one of those things, like a computer for books?"

Yes.  Yes, it is.