Reasons to buy a Kindle or a Nook

People have been asking me whether I like my Kindle and whether they should buy one. Two reasons to buy plus some downsides.

First, it's single purpose. For those generally in touch with gadgets, the buzz is that the Apple "iTablet" is going to launch and therefore, shouldn't you wait for that device because surely, like the iPhone, it will have a free Kindle application? Maybe. It will be hard to justify the cost of both a single purpose Kindle and the iTablet. It seems likely that the iTablet will launch, sooner or later, or at least that Apple will be launching a higher resolution version of the iPhone on which book reading will be even better than the current iPhone. But the key to the Kindle is that it does one thing that the iTablet will never do: not everything. The beauty of the Kindle is that it's single purpose. When you're using it you don't have the seduction of the WWW. Your world is restricted to the multi-tasking afforded by having a multitude of books at your fingertips. If you want to read books on a multi-purpose device, you can read them quite well on your laptop. The PC version works very well and a Mac version is coming soon. When I don't have my Kindle and I can't resist the allure of a place like Brakebills, my laptop is ready to serve.

Second, it's the future today. Why not stick with paper books? I love paper books. I'd love a library room in my house with floor to ceiling bookshelves, chairs for reading, silence and the right light. But those books would be largely decoration. And my house is already overflowing with paper books and I don't even have a dedicated library. I like the idea of having fewer physical possessions, not more, and being able to carry the world of knowledge in a little device that can slip unnoticed into my bag. In the future--the not too distant future--we'll have devices with screens indistinguishable from paper that are just a few millimeters thick, perhaps can be rolled up, and can carry tens or hundreds of thousands of books. I look forward to that day! Functionally, the Kindle comes close enough to be able to taste that future now.

Downsides? You can't share books on the Kindle (you can on Barnes & Noble's Nook). The data is stored at Amazon. Sure, if they vaporized you'd still have the books on your Kindle. But still, it feels a bit like owning them on long-term loan from Amazon instead of really owning them. And the freaky echoes are still resonating of Amazon pulling back Orwell's 1984 from people's Kindles when they realized they didn't have the copyright for that edition worked out.