christmas stories and songs for you and the kids

The latest Amazon Kindle e-book reader is, in my opinion at least, a dream come true. I freely confess that, as someone who counts reading among my main hobbies, I must be pretty much Amazon’s target market. Typically, I would expect to read, as an absolute minimum, one book each week – and it’s not so very unusual for me to have one novel, one non-fiction and a fair number of reference books under consideration at any one time.

I don’t think that’s so really uncommon, otherwise traditional print books wouldn’t sell so well, but it does mean that I can spend quite a bit of money on books. Putting the costs of the books to one side, my mini library of books does tend towards untidy and soon eats up a fair bit of space at home. Every so often, I go through the assorted volumes and, putting the reference books and any particular favourites to one side, have a clear out. Typically the books will go to charity shops, friends or relatives.

I recently got rid of over fifty volumes in advance of moving house. It wasn’t until I saw them, boxed up and ready to go, that I realised I was looking at a spend of somewhere between $500 and $1000 which had built up in just under a year.

Now, whilst the Amazon Kindle is a fairly pricey item in itself, the downloadable e-books from the Kindle store are usually quite a bit cheaper than the printed equivalent. After all, there are no printing or distribution costs for the book’s publisher and neither are there any postal charges for Amazon. Even saving just a few dollars a book, which seems quite achievable, anyone who reads on a regular basis could fairly quickly recover the cost of the device and then start to save money over time.

The potential benefits aren’t just financial. The Kindle 2 has a storage capacity for around 1500 e-books whereas the Kindle DX, which will start shipping on June 10 2009, can store 3500. That’s a lot of books – and a fair amount of physical storage space which will no longer be needed in your home or office.

Some users have suggested that the Kindle is a green, eco-friendly, device – based upon the fact that it will save on the usage of paper. The logic is easy to see, but obviously some thought should also be given to the materials used in production as well as the disposal of the device at the end of its useful life.

The actual benefits achieved will vary from user to user and will probably depend chiefly on how many books are bought per annum. All the same, for regular readers, it seems that the Kindle has a number of distinct advantages which should more than offset the initial cost.