Why Would You Want To Buy A Cheap Kindle

Until recently I belonged to the majority of book lovers in the world who considered the Kindle electronic book reader a blasphemy? I love reading books. I’ve read nearly every day of my life since I was in my teens. Reading is one of my passions. I cannot understand people who choose to fiddle with their mobile phones for hours on trains instead of exposing their minds to the great narratives, characters and themes of famous writers past and present. As Cliff Fadiman said:

“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”

Those people who don’t read obviously wish to learn nothing new about themselves. So why did I take such a dim view of buying a Kindle? Well like so many people I grew up with books. There is a magic to owning a book, writing in the margins, getting to the final page, reading the author blurb, stopping at the end to reflect. The physicality of a book seemed important to me.

Now that I’ve bought a Kindle I realize how wrong I was. Reading a book from a cheap Kindle is more enjoyable and comfortable than curling up with a paperback. My Kindle is the same size as a book, but very slim (only 1/3 inch) and very light (only 10.2 ounces). And the screen doesn’t look like a screen. Rather the text looks the same as the printed word with no glare or fuzziness. The words are sharp and clear and reading from my Kindle doesn’t hurt my eyes (unlike the irritating light of the iPad).

Don’t just take my word for it read reviews on Amazon about the incredible readability of the Kindle wireless reading device.

can do everything I used to do with my paperbacks – I can bookmark sections, I can flick through sections. And I can do more – I can save passages and I can access the internet to tweet and facebook.

This is where if you buy a Kindle wireless reading device it has the advantage over a normal book. It allows you free access to the internet. No, you did not read incorrectly - free internet. The Kindle has 3G wireless built into it that can be accessed from all over the world (coverage varies but is growing everyday). So whether you live in America, Canada, Europe, Australia, Chile, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Paraguay, Southern Russia. India, Thailand or East China you can connect to the internet for free and browse basic text-centric sites. This is the key to the Kindle. You don’t have to go to a shop to buy books; you don’t even need to download eBooks from Amazon on to your computer. You simply use the user friendly keypad on the Kindle to type in the author’s name or the books name or the genre you are interested in and the Kindle automatically connects to the internet and finds the book for you. If the book was written before 1923 then you can download it straight to your Kindle for free. This is because all books published prior to 1923 are now out of copyright. A book can be downloaded in as little as 60 seconds to your library. The Kindle can hold 1,500 books in its memory; and the bigger Kindle DX can hold a staggering 3,500 books. This is bigger than nearly anybody’s personal library. The possibilities are endless. You can possess for free every novel, play or poem ever written by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Balzac, James Joyce, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jonathan Swift, Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and Edgar Alan Poe. The list is nearly endless. There are over 1.8 million books to download for free on the Kindle. The Kindle costs $189 on Amazon. That means that if you spend an average of $5 for a second hand book then after you’ve downloaded 58 free books on your Kindle you have made a profit.

The Kindle service also has over 600,000 books in copyright to purchase, including the very latest books by best-selling authors. New releases can be downloaded for as little as $9.99 to your Kindle. And it’s not only books – you can download for free the latest editions of newspapers and magazines.

For those people who have poor eyesight the Kindle allows you to read big text and many Kindle books include a text-to-speech function so you can listen to the book instead of reading it.

I still love my books and I’m reluctant to throw them away but truth be told I hardly ever reach to my bookshelf anymore for something to read. Instead I take out my Kindle and start reading pretty much anything I’m interested in at the time. The Kindle has done for books what the iPod did for music: it has digitalized and simplified our collections; it has allowed us to own huge libraries and to discover so many new and interesting artists. If Cliff Fadiman is correct the Kindle will allow us to understand more about ourselves.