My desire has been Kindled

If you are a bookworm like me the idea of reading off a gadget must seem pretty horrendous. However I travel a lot and carrying books around is just more weight in the luggage. Frequently I have several tucked away. At dinner the other evening PS showed me his Kindle and I must admit I thought it was excellent so I went home and ordered one from Amazon USA. It arrived in a matter of days. I bought a leather cover for it and the whole lot including postage was about US$300. It was already registered and when I switched it on it showed as "Andrew's Kindle". A nice touch. It comes with a dreadful two flat-pin USA plug so you need an adaptor if you live in the civilized world.

It is wi fi and I managed to download a couple of books quite easily. No cables needed. It is pretty intuitive and sits easily in the hand. I bough the smaller version but you can purchase one in A4 size if you wish. I changed the font size to make it easier for my old eyes - you can't do that with a book. You could use a magnifying glass but thats a bit awkward. You can make notes on it and place bookmarks but I have not yet managed to tear a page by mistake. It is quite light and Amazon has resisted the temptation to make it too showy. Very understated. It is not in colour but I normally read in black and white.

Any shortcomings? Well its not an iPad as one of my colleagues pointed out. But he's a gadget freak and just MUST HAVE every new boy's toy that comes out. And its a lot cheaper than the iPad - about half the price. It may not have every book you want - paper won't go out of fashion, of that I am sure. But for travelling I think 1000 books is plenty. If you really get to fill it up you can delete the book but it remains stored on Amazon's server for you to download again later if you wish. They even store your notes and bookmarks. I suppose its a bit like paying to use an online library.

So this is an 8/10 product for me. It loses a bit because I have already failed to find a few books for download that I wanted and of course it's not paper. But that's about it. It does, as they say, what it says on the tin. Very neat.