It’s the classic story. You’re packing tight for that road trip. It starts out two pairs of jeans, six pair of underwear, four pair of sox, and so on. By the time you’ve got the T-bag stuffed you’re down to a couple of pairs of underwear and a single pair of jeans. Inevitably there’s no room for that book you’ve been reading. Or, worse you’re almost done with one book and ready to start another one. There’s definately no room for two books. “So, where is he going with this?”

Right. And, the point is. I needed a little intro to justify my latest foray into technology. The Amazon (.com) Kindle. What the heck is that, you say. It’s the latest attempt at an “electronic” book. I say latest, because there have been a handful of companies, including Sony, that have tried to create electronic books and failed. There’s nothing like the feel of a book in your hands, right?

Well, the world is changing. And, I think Amazon may have gotten it right. Who better, with their experience distributing the printed book. At roughly 5″ by 7″ and less than an inch thick, this device is the perfect size to hold and travel with. Battery life is excellent because of the completely-different-than-pc-screen-technology. Maybe best of all, it holds a ton of books. You can load maybe 5 years worth of reading on here. I’m just making that up, but really it holds a lot. You can change the size of the type. You can read indoors; you can read outdoors.

Here’s what I like almost best, it’s easier to order and receive a book than the conventional way of ordering from Amazon. Impossible you say. Believe it. Right from your Kindle screen, you search for a book, find it, one-click buy it, and it’s ready to read in about 30 seconds. Oh, and you aren’t plugged into anything. I’m not even going to tell you how that works. Check out the product site to find out more and figure out where I got my facts wrong.

So, what’s the downside. Well, the biggest one I can think of is this: the days of impressing the cute gal next to you on the plane are over. You know the scenario - she’s so impressed because your reading a well-worn, unabridged copy of War and Peace. Oh, well, that really never worked anyway.

Solves the packing problem at least!

Quick footnote: you’re probably thinking the economics don’t work. The initial buy-in to get the unit is a bit steep. But then, the books are about 2/3 the cost of the printed version and there’s no shipping, and no wireless charges. So, depending on how you want to crunch the numbers, the thing really pencils out too. Not to mention the rainforest of trees we won’t be using to print those books you read only once, blah, blah, blah. I wish I was getting a commission on this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Interesting Stuff, Products, Touring Long (or Short). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.