What better thing to do last night after the snow shoveling and school work were done than to play with my new Kindle? I had finished the manual the night before and I was rarin’ to go. With Emily and Dorothy reviewing Gaudy Night recently I looked up Dorothy Sayers and the only sample I could get was from a nonfiction book she wrote called Are Women Human? The sample downloaded before I could blink. Unfortunately, the sample had none of the text, only a picture of the book cover, the colophon and the table of contents. Fine then. I didn’t want to read samples anyway, I want to read whole books.
 
That gave me a chance to try out manybooks.net. I went to the mobile version which fit perfectly on the Kindle screen, and poked around. So much to choose from! I chose The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, because what could be more fitting for my first Kindle book? But before I got to reading, I went to Feedbooks and downloaded their catalog. It’s a big document and took almost a minute to download but what I get is offline book searching and when I find a book I want, I just click the link and it downloads. Free! What could be easier?
 
Now for the reading. I read for an hour and my eyes did not get tired at all. In fact, after a little while I forgot I was holding a Kindle and not a book. The only thing that takes getting used to is the way the pages “turn.” It doesn’t scroll or instantly change like a computer screen. The e-ink has to re-form itself into the new letters so you get a sort of “flash” effect and the page appears in negative and then the new page is on the screen. It is weird and freaked out my eyes the first couple of times but after a few pages I didn’t notice it as much.
 
I tried out the highlighting feature and love it. When you highlight something in a book, Kindle saves it to a special folder called “My Clips” with a sort of annotation so you know where it came from. So, for instance, I highlighted two things in the Emerson letters. If I want to see what they are I can page through the book but that is not really convenient. If I remember enough keywords I can do a search. Or, even better, I can go to the clips folder and there they are. Once I get lots of clips in there though I am not sure that it will be any more efficient than the other two methods. There must be some way to sort them or something. At least I hope there is.
 
I have yet to try out bookmarking or writing marginalia. I haven’t tried having a PDF or other document converted for reading on Kindle either. I’ll get to those eventually. But so far, so good on the Kindle experience.
 
My Bookman has not yet given it a test drive. His work schedule has been weird of late. But this morning as we saw each other in passing he showed me a great surprise. He has an ARC of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s new book! A box of advanced readers arrived in the bookstore office the other day and no one had opened it so he opened it last night and got first dibs. He had the day off today. I told him I expected I would come home to him sobbing as he turned the final page. He said he is going to read the book slowly and savor it. And what do you know, he didn’t even open it today. He has far greater discipline than I would have in the same situation.