Re-Kindled

With a few weeks of experience under my belt, I can say I'm now an official e-book convert. I'm not giving up my addiction to print, but I'm scaling it back a bit. I made my first bookstore run in weeks last night, and while I picked up a couple things -- notably Natsuo Kirino's Real World -- mostly I looked at books and thought, "I wonder if I can get that on my Kindle?"

About the only motto I have in life is, "Always bring a book," so the ability to take a small library with me wherever I go has been wonderful, even better than I expected from my first days of experience with the Kindle. But where it's come in surprisingly handy is the gym.

You see, while I may have been easily seduced by the lure of electronic books, I have never enjoyed audiobooks. Hate them, in fact. I just find them so passive and unengaging, like listening to badly written radio plays -- it's a shoehorning of one artform into another format in the name of convenience, and it just doesn't work for me.

So listening to audiobooks at the gym (or anywhere) has been a nonstarter for me. But reading my Kindle while on the elliptical trainer works perfectly -- no fumbling with turning pages, no awkward attempts to keep pages from turning themselves, the ability to switch instantly to another book if the current selection isn't doing it for me.

Yeah, I'm the kind of person who's reading four or five books at a time -- I almost always have something that suits my mood at the moment. It's probably a bit of a bad habit, but at this age I'm not inclined to do anything about it.

So the Kindle is my new gym buddy, way more entertaining and useful than watching tv shows on my iPhone. Now if Amazon could just do something about the fugly nature of the thing....

Comments

[Sean Bugg]

I'll never lose my love of the feeling of a big, heavy book lying on my chest to kick off a nap -- the Kindle is way too lightweight for that. But I have to say that, despite my love for the page, I'm really finding the Kindle to be a great replacement for 1) genre novels and paperbacks that I often by on impulse and don't get read immediately because I'm embarrassed to take them out in public, 2) big, honking books of history and politics, such as Nixonland, which I'm loving but would have finished long ago if I were reading it anywhere but in bed every night before sleep, and 3) a combo of those two, big political books that I would be embarrassed to be seen reading in public.

On a Kindle, everyone is reading War and Peace.

[jimbo]

While I haven't tried Kindle, I still love the smell, touch and look of a book. But I think resistance is futile in this case, as even good 'ol Dungeons and Dragons accessories are now going electronic.

[Nate]

I just got mine for my birthday, it great, I carry it everywhere, the bad reviews are unfounded!

I recommend 'Hello Vodka it's me Chelsea" for light reading and 'Swan Peak" for more invloved fiction