We never thought we would cave in and buy one of these gadgets. We do love our books! However, some time last year, during one of my book club meetings, one of the ladies showed me their Kindle and I was really surprised at how nice it looked!
I was still a bit stubbornly resistant to the idea at the time but I was now open to the possibilities.
What cinched the idea was our difficulty in getting some old books in print. George MacDonald is our new favorite author (although, he is not by any means a new author!). His work is actually in the public domain but reading a book off the computer is not my idea of pleasant. He has a handful of novels still being printed...but mostly children's and adult fantasy only. All his other work is out of print. There is an author who came out with some abridged versions of some of his novels but I would much rather have the originals. Besides, his work has also gone out of print and you can really only buy used copies. Therein lay our frustration!
In comes the Kindle. We figure that if we can download the complete works of George MacDonald from the public domain, it would already pay for the price of the Kindle and make it worth while! Not to mention, the fact that I can do that for some of my other favorite authors (e.g. Jane Austen, the Bronte Sisters, Edith Warton, Oscar Wilde, Frances Hodgson Burnett...the possibilities are endless!). So if you consider that, the Kindle was such a great deal!
Christian was also interested in the George MacDonald works but his other supporting works would include being able to download the Journals of Discourses and the History of the Church which would also more than pay for the device!
All that information at our fingertips! I haven't been so excited about something is a long time and have been inhaling new books ever since (whenever I get the chance).
Luckily for us, we did not really consider buying new books that much as we have since found out that some of the new books are just as expensive (if not more) as the printed books. Also, we had heard that the public library was offering e-books that you can borrow, but every book we looked up seemed to have a waiting list a mile long. So some of those things as well as formatting issues have cropped up as a problem but they aren't really anything that significant to our original reasons for getting a Kindle. It just would have been a nice option.
One of my favorite features of my new Kindle Touch is being able to touch a word that I do not know and have it pull up the word in the dictionary in an instant! It is especially useful in reading these old novels. They use a lot of archaic terms that just are not used today. I also like being able to highlight passages. I was never really one to highlight books (especially in my scriptures). It seemed like graffiti to me. But there are so many gems in my George MacDonald novels that I find that I am highlighting them all the time so I can talk about them with Christian when he gets home or just for future reference.
I have to say, I'm sold. I love it!
