I received my Amazon Kindle on November 30. Seeing the prices that these readers are going for on Ebay I had a five-minute moral struggle: sell for a profit or start reading?

The reading won out. As it turned out, I made a good decision. This is a great little e-reader.

One of my main reasons for purchasing the Amazon Kindle is so I will have plenty of reading material when I travel. For instance, next month we are going on a ten night cruise of the Panama Canal. Since I like to travel as light as possible, in past I would take a paperback that I would discard upon reading, and then hope that the library of the ship had something I wanted to read.

Now, however, when I board ship I shall have the book "The Path Between the Seas" by David McCullough (about the building of the Canal), as well as dozen of other books. I realize that the Kindle wireless system will not work out of the USA, but there is nothing to prevent me from loading up beforehand.

Major selling points for me:

1. A lot of books may be stored on the Amazon Kindle. I have some 30 books and magazines on it already, yet I still have 151 MB available; plus I could insert a SD card for even more memory.

2. The screen is easy on the eyes. I have read in bed by the light of a lamp, and I have read outside in the full glare of the sun. Easy to read in both situations. I disagree with those who argue for a white screen: it would have been too dazzling outside.

3. Very easy to change the font size. My wife, who is being treated for the wet form of Macular Degeneration (doing splendidly due to the new miracle drug, Lucentis!) loves being able to change the font size depending on how her eyes are feeling or doing. I do too.

4. I discovered that I really, really enjoy reading `samples'. Amazon allows you to download a sample from Amazon Kindle-formatted books. The samples appear to consist of the Introduction and the first chapter. For instance, I sampled the new Steve Martin book "Born Standing Up" and found myself enjoying it very much. I ended up buying the full book. On the flip side, I sampled Michael Palin's new book "Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years", and discovered I did not care to read his diary. Money saved.

5. Magazines: I remember Reader's Digest back when they did not have advertising (which they began accepting in the 1970s). Now, when you purchase the magazine, it seems to be nothing but advertising. The Kindle edition does not have one single ad. You get nothing but the articles, etc. I also enjoy reading Time magazine, and I have been reading the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. I just make sure I turn the wireless feature `on' before going to bed, and they will be on my Kindle upon awakening. Fantastic.

A note on battery life: the wireless feature drains the battery pretty quickly. I keep the wireless feature off unless I am expecting delivery of an item from Amazon. At night I use the provided AC adapter and so recharge the Kindle while I sleep, with the wireless on so my newspapers will be delivered.

6. Amazon has a huge selection of books. While they advertise the best sellers are being only $9.99 (unless marked otherwise!) they also have a lot of less expensive books in Kindle form.

Or, you can get books for free from sites like manybooks.net. These are books that either pre-date copyright laws (Shakespeare, etc) or their copyrights have expired (Mark Twain, etc). All you do is hook up your Kindle to your computer (using the provided cable by Kindle), choose the ebook you want at manybooks, use the Mobipocket format, and target your Amazon Kindle. Hit download, and within a minute the book will be on your Amazon Kindle. I quickly loaded some 10 classic books (plus, I donated, via Paypal, to Manybooks, and got a very nice letter back from them; I'm afraid not that many people donate money).

7. The Dictionary: see a word you are uncertain about? Move the cursor up to the line containing the word, press the mouse-button, then select "look up". The Kindle will then look up each word on the line (except for `the', `a', etc). A great feature.

8. Keeps your place! I am reading five different books. The Kindle remembers where I left off for each book.

9. The wireless works as advertised. Make a purchase, and within a minute or so the product is on your device. Or, if the wireless connection happens to be off when you make the purchase (if purchasing on the computer), it will load the next time you turn the wireless feature on.

10. The leather cover feels good in the hand.

I do not really have any `cons'. However, I do agree about the button placement. It is far too easy to hit the `previous' and `next' page buttons. I am getting more used to the buttons, but they did not need to be so big.

I do not have a quarrel with the price of the Kindle. Amazon did their market research and came up with a price that they obviously thought their target market would pay. I paid it. As all well know, the Amazon Kindle sold out quickly. People on Ebay are paying $1,000.00 for the Kindle in order to have it for Christmas.

I enjoy those `negative Nellies' (to quote Ned Flanders) who write that Amazon overpriced the Kindle and hence those running Amazon are greedy idiots. I guess they imagined the following scene having occurred on the day of the Kindle's debut:

(Clerk, running into Jeff Bezos' office): "Sir, the 20,000 initial run of Kindle units sold out within six hours!"

(Jeff Bezos, jumping out of chair in alarm): "Great Scott! We must have overpriced it!"

Anyway, I highly recommend the Amazon Kindle for those who love to read.

J. Lanctot

Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device

Amazon Kindle