Don't get a Kindle

The headline is misleading - I actually love my Kindle. I have read several books I otherwise would have not read. What I don’t get is why otherwise well-healed and technology literate folk dismiss the Kindle out-of-hand. The most common reason? It’s not dead-tree paper. You can’t hold it. You can’t feel it. Yet the biggest thing they dismiss is me. It’s personal. I have an eye condition which means I wear hard plastic contacts all day long - my eyes get very tired, very easily.

But the Kindle is a wonderful reading device. I don’t read much books (I do most on-screen as I am on a computer constantly). It allows me and millions like me to enlarge the text and get a comfortable reading experience. I can adjust contrast (important when you suffer from shadowing/ghosting of an image) and much, much more. It also has on certain models a read-to-me computer generated voice. These advances cannot be dismissed and most importantly they aren’t offered by dead-tree books.

I am sure the real book is beautiful, pleasant and looks the part with its fancy cover. But if I can’t read it comfortably, it’s next-to-useless. And that for me is end of sentence, paragraph and book (paper or e).