My Precious

I have joined the future. Or something momentous like that. As of my recent birthday, I have entered the world of ebooks. My husband gave me a Kindle.

I hadn’t thought much about e-readers, beyond wondering if my husband would like one—until a day or two before my birthday, when it was too late to ask for anything, and suddenly, I really, REALLY wanted a Kindle. My wonderful husband had figured this out before I did, and had bought one for me. I was thrilled.

I was not the only one excited by this new addition to the family. My ten-year-old son is our resident technology whiz, and new technology turns his brain cells to fireworks. He wanted to see the Kindle, handle the Kindle, play with the Kindle, pull out the groovy little built-in book light on the Kindle cover, and so on. Meanwhile, being a possessive new Kindle owner, I’m nervous at having these inquisitive and sometimes inadvertently destructive fingers handling my new e-reader. So we’ve got him hyperventilating, microchips flashing in his eyes, while I clutch the Kindle to my chest and hiss, “Don’t touch the Precious.”

Along with the Kindle, my husband gave me my first ebook—Betsy Brannon Green’s new Kennedy Killingsworth mystery, Murder by Design.

I quickly added to my collection (in a wonderfully complementary gift, my parents had given me an Amazon gift certificate). I bought a copy of Gone With the Wind (how many copies of that book have I gone through? The size of it makes it fall apart, but now on the Kindle, it will never fall apart again! O joy!), To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis (I already own it in hardback, but it’s one of my all-time absolute favorites, so of course I wanted it on the Kindle), Josi Kilpack’s Key Lime Pie, Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (one of my favorites from childhood on up), and Julie Wright’s Cross My Heart. My husband added Moby Dick, his favorite book. One of these days I really should break down and read Moby Dick. Maybe having it on the Precious will tempt me to try it out.

My parents-in-law sent me some money for my birthday, so I used that to buy myself a bigger purse. I had a fairly small purse, and I wanted a purse big enough to comfortably hold the Kindle so I can take it with me on the go. I love how easy it is to take the Kindle with me—I can just slide it into my purse, and then if I get stuck in a long grocery store line, or what have you, I can pull it out and start reading. I like to read while exercising on our old Elliptical, and the Kindle works great for that too.

This blog brought to you by Amazon.com!

Just kidding. Unfortunately, they didn’t pay me to do Kindle ads, but I am really enjoying my new e-reader. I have now read Betsy’s book and half of Julie’s book, and have discovered that I really enjoy reading in e-format. I’m particularly delighted that LDS publishers are starting to make their books available in e-form. My library doesn’t stock LDS novels, and in a sad economic turn of events, the little LDS bookstore ten minutes away closed down a few years ago, and last year, the Seagull Book in Oakland followed. There is still a bookstore in San Jose, but I very rarely am in that area. I can order online, of course, but now, with ebooks, I can get my hands on LDS novels in seconds.

This is bad.

Bad for my wallet, I mean. It’s so EASY to click the mouse and there’s the book, right in my hands. It would be WAY easy to spend too much money that way. Talk about temptation.

I’m also delighted at the thought that Whitney Academy reading will be much easier with the Kindle. Many of the Whitney finalists provide their books to the judging academy in PDF form, which meant that last year, I spent a lot of time reading on my computer. But with the Kindle, I can now read Whitney finalists while exercising, standing in lines, etc. Only problem is, we haven’t yet worked the bugs out of how to change PDFs into a readable format (but I know it can be done!) No matter what we’ve tried, it's turned out weird. When I put a PDF straight on the Kindle, the fonts is too small. When I tried to enlarge it, it was promptly too big—I would have had to scroll side to side. I tried converting it—the formatting came out way weird. My son, Techno-boy, tried converting it to a Word doc, which almost worked, but, strangely, changed “th” to a big exclamation point. Hmm. Well, we’ll keep trying. Backup plan: buy magnifying reading glasses and read the small font. Or hand the Kindle to Techno-Boy and tell him to let me know when he’s figured it out. He’d love that.