Okay.....I have to hold my hands up here and admit I LOVE my Kindle.
The Husband surprised me with one for Christmas. I was initially dubious whether I'd find it that useful, and being a devoted bibliophile was certain that it would never replace the physical attraction of a book but....uh huh....the more I got into it, the more indispensible it became.
The Husband surprised me with one for Christmas. I was initially dubious whether I'd find it that useful, and being a devoted bibliophile was certain that it would never replace the physical attraction of a book but....uh huh....the more I got into it, the more indispensible it became.
A friend of mine, who also got one as a present, agrees that she, too, will probably never buy another work of fiction in hard or paperback format ever again. Relief! No more rootling through the oh-so-tempting three-for-two offers, looking for a third book that, in truth, we don't really want but feel we must buy to get our money's worth. Also, thanks to the brilliant facility of being able to download a sample chapter, no more buying of dud novels, ones which initially appeal but soon get chucked down at the side of the bed.
I've bought single issues of periodicals (not really interested enough in any one publication to suscribe) and am currently trying out a free two-week subscription for the Daily Telegraph. I am quite impressed by this facility - the paper magically appears on the Kindle around 7am and I can catch up on the news without getting out of bed. Plus no excess newsprint cluttering up the recycling bin.
I've bought single issues of periodicals (not really interested enough in any one publication to suscribe) and am currently trying out a free two-week subscription for the Daily Telegraph. I am quite impressed by this facility - the paper magically appears on the Kindle around 7am and I can catch up on the news without getting out of bed. Plus no excess newsprint cluttering up the recycling bin.
Obviously there are some books that I just can't get hold of in Kindle format - the academic variety - and some are bizarrely expensive. I'm not going to pay over the hardback price for a book that I don't exactly 'have' physically, and I do like my 'library' of real print and paper. Plus academic books have a certain second-hand value. You certainly haven't got that if it's in electronic format! In fact, I'm not really sure what happens if your Kindle goes tits-up.
You can also upload PDFs (the bane of my life) onto it and the highlight/clippings facility means you can accumulate a lot of useful references and store them easily.
It's also very easy to read on a Kindle: I find back-lit computer screens rather hard to read from, but the soothing grey non-illuminated Kindle screen makes it no more tiring than an ordinary paper page.
One of the first books that I downloaded was The Fry Chronicles, the second part of Stephen Fry's autobiography. I had been expecting it from the in-laws, but it never materialised. Being short of a book over the hols, once I got my Kindle I went into a bit of a download frenzy (although much of the stuff I downloaded was free, being out of copyright). It was quite a good read, and having finished it -frustratingly it ends far short of the present day - went onto the Amazon site and downloaded Moab is My Washpot, volume one of Fry's autobiography. I had read it before, but on re-reading realised that I had forgotten much of it.
Other download purchases include Constantine Campbell's Keep Your Greek - not much more than the hastily compiled fruit of a blog (with some stunning editorial oversights - the transpositions of two Greek words and their meanings renders the whole book dubious); an interlinear Greek/English New Testament; the Grosmiths' Diary of a Nobody (free); the Discourses of Epictetus (free) and various samples: Susan Hill's The Little Hand (will probably purchase this after I've finished my current read), Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question (excellent - will definitely get later), Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe (hmm...dunno about this) and Mrs Fry's Diary (no, definitely not). I'm also dallying with The Spectator and The New Statesman, both of which I never bothered with in paper format (probably due to the price), but are proving to be excellent diversions.
A convert, then.
One of the best actual books I got just before Christmas was The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World by Guido Majno, a comprehensive survey of medecine and therapy across the ancient world from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, India, the Far East and Rome. Intriguing and stomach-turning, it kept me from my Kindle (until the paper turned up at 7) first thing in the morning over the holidays and slotted nicely in with my current side-project on the Roman physician Galen. I also got the only Loeb Classical Edition of Galen's work, a 1916 translation of On the Natural Faculties by A J Brock which I intend to work through, the Cambridge Companion to Galen (very hard going indeed!) and completely unrelated The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (not really started yet).
Funnily enough, I went to an antiquarian bookfair run by the Provincial Book Fairs Association at the Knavesmire on Saturday. I'd missed the previous one due to family commitments (grumpily blogged about in my parablepsis blog) and was determined to attend this one. But in truth, I found it slightly disappointing. True, there were some lovely editions (a three-volume set of Linnaean botany with hand-tinted plates; a Rackham-illustrated Water Babies), but I was underwhelmed by my reaction to the lovingly buffed leather gold-tooled spines, even though some were within my budget. There were also a lot of book 'enthusiasts' there - and though I'm sure they can't all have smelly jumpers or fleeces, stained cord trousers and bottled-bottom glasses, it certainly seemed that way. Maybe I'm just sated with books and book-buying?
