booklust

When I'm at work and I should be doing stupid, annoying, but necessary work things, I can think of a half dozen books I want to read. When I'm at home and looking at the little search bar on Amazon, I can't think of any of them. How is that fair?

But I will say this: Since they gave me that ipad, I've been totally won over by the Kindle App. Most books are available there-- eight of the ten for class, and about the same percentage of all books I've looked up since then*. The reading experience is clean and clear and lovely. You can hilight and comment, just like in a real book, but with better handwriting. And there are things that aren't in real books-- lines that lots of people hilight come up underlined in the e-copy, and if there's a footnote (which there tends to be lots of in the sorts of books I read), it comes up as a link in the text, and if you click on it, it loads it into the text itself so you don't have to go searching through the book to find the right note!

And best of all, Kindle is a boy-once place. If something happens to your iPad, you can download it again later because you've already bought it. If you get it for the iPad, you can also get it for your desktop. Short of losing all their servers, it's about as safe as a digital book can be!

And now I'm eyeing all my actual books and thinking, I could replace all these with digiversions. I could clear that whole shelf... I mean, I'll keep all the really old books, the ones I inherited from Papa and the Modern Library collection. I'll keep the ones I really love and have filled with notes and the ones that I return to over and over. But I could easily replace a lot of them that I want to keep around but don't go back to as often, if they're available...


*No PC Hodgell on Kindle, which makes me sad. More people should read her books so they can stay in print and at the same publishers. They're awesome, and I really need to get the next one in the series. If I can find it.