A new High in Geekery

I've told you before I'm a geek. Well this week I have achieved a new high in my geekery rating. I have a birthday coming up, as well as an anniversary. My husband asked me what I wanted, I told him, "It's kind of expensive, but I'd really like to have a Kindle" He said "Okay, order one up for yourself" Wow, if only it was always that easy! Seriously though, now he's completely off the hook for not only an anniversary gift, but a birthday gift as well. I guess it was worth it for him! Bad news is, I still have to come up with an anniversary gift!

Back to the geekery, though. If you don't know what a Kindle is, it's an electronic reader made by Amazon. You can connect wirelessly to their web site to download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs. The prices for the books and newspapers are pretty reasonable. The books off the New York Times Bestseller list go for about $10., and older books go for $5 to $7. Not bad. I ordered a couple of books. I've already finished one, and have a good start on the second. My Kindle is fairly easy to use. I took a little time to scan through the owners manual to get an idea of what it could do, and have become quite comfortable with it fairly quickly. It's much easier to read from compared to a computer monitor. Really not much different than reading from a book. It's about the size and weight of a paperback, and with the cover, you could almost imagine you're holding a book. If you're really into the tactile aspect of turning pages, you'll miss that, but I found that once I started to get into the story I was reading, it was easy to forget that I wasn't reading just any regular book.

If you're the type that likes to makes notes about what you're reading, you can do that. If you need to look up a word in the dictionary, one is included for your convenience. You can make bookmarks, add tags, and I'm sure a number of other things I have not yet discovered. I tried out the experimental section to use the web access. The connection was a little slow, and I don't know yet how much that brief foray onto the world wide web cost, but I had to give it a try. I checked my gmail account, looked up Rockhoppers Daily Grind, and that was it. ( As an 'oh-by=the=way' downloading a book wirelessly takes only a a short time, and does not incur additional fees over the cost of the book)

I have also discovered, so far, at least one web site that offers free downloads of Science Fiction books that are compatible with the format used on my Kindle. (I can download to my computer, and then transfer them through the USB port on the Kindle) It's the Baen Free Library There are some well known authors whose works are published there, and I'm looking forward to downloading a few titles for my Kindle. I am quite sure there are others as well for more general titles. If there appears to be interest, I'll post them as I find them.

If any of you living in the nearby area would like a chance to get a good look at a Kindle, come by the Rockhopper on a Saturday night! I'm almost always there, and as long as the battery isn't dead, (One charge has gotten me through one book, two newspaper issues and a fair amount of 'show & tell' so far!) I'll be happy to show it off!

Kindle on Whidbey Island.