Okay, so I bought a Kindle.

Now, officially, I don’t like such electronic gizmos. My oft-stated position has long been that the traditional hard-copy book is good enough for me. For one thing, the batteries don’t go dead.

Be that as it may, when Amazon lowered the price a couple of months ago, I bought a Kindle 2. I was out of shelf space for new hard-copy books and I thought, what the heck. It’s turned out to be pretty neat, though I wasn’t aware that the original $189.00 price tag wasn’t the whole story. A few days after I got it, I had grown fond enough of it to break down and buy the extended warranty, which was another $60. Then I bought a fancy case, to the tune of $40 or so, plus tax. So, it’s a good thing I really like the little dingus because by now I’ve got close to $300 tied up in it, not counting the ebooks I’ve purchased.

The ebook total doesn’t amount to much yet, however, as I’m a little leery of spending real money for things that lack an actual corporeal existence (any software products of my employer excepted, of course). My first download was something called Free Kindle Books and How to Find Them, which, ironically, cost me $1.99. It was pretty well worth it, though, because I found out there are LOTS of free books available, so many you could read from now on and never spend another penny on ebooks. In all there are probably hundreds of thousands of ebooks out there that can be either read natively on the Kindle or through a little processing made to be readable. Ebooks in pdf format can be read straightaway, usually, and for other formats Amazon has a funky system whereby you can email a document and for $.15, Amazon will format and download the result to your Kindle. Or to any of the Kindle apps you happen to have.

Speaking of Kindle apps, they are a pretty neat adjunct to the device itself. Amazon makes available free apps for every conceivable ebook reader (all sorts of smartphones, PCs, Macs, the iPad, etc), so that you can be a Kindle ebook customer without having a Kindle device. I have a Kindle app for my Droid Incredible and also for three of my PCs. The cool thing about it is, when I’m ready to stop reading a given ebook on one device, I can sync it on the Amazon site, then re-sync later from another device and pick up reading where I left off. As one who has spent far too much of his reading life trying to find that place I forgot to bookmark, this is a great feature.

I also like having 3G and so far I haven’t traveled very far out of its range. Last month at the beach I finished a hard-copy book in a series of thrillers I’ve been reading. Rather than having to look for the next book in the series in a book store, I was able to download it within a few seconds. And, yes, the e-ink screen reads fine in the bright sunshine.

All in all, I’m happy with my Kindle. I don’t have to turn pages, the battery life is not eternal but is still pretty darn good, and I’m saving on the shelf space I ran out of a long time ago anyway. Of course, as I am gloatingly informed by Kirsten, in the office next door to mine, whom you all know and who happens to be the proud owner of a new Kindle 3, my Kindle 2 is now obsolete. But that’s okay. I’ve never been comfortable on the leading edge anyway.