Your Kindle or mine?

Our his-and-hers Kindles.

I was surveying packages under the tree on Christmas Eve when I made a startling discovery.

“Hey honey, I think we got each other the same present for Christmas,” I told my husband.

“No way! Mine is a super-duper present,” was his reply.

“So is mine!” I said, slightly offended that he would think I wouldn’t get him an equally super-duper gift.

We compared the packages and weighed them, one in each hand. We decided that he would open his, and if it was the same thing, I could open mine. He opened his, and starting laughing like crazy.

We had bought each other Kindle readers from Amazon.com.

After living with the Kindle for a week, I can make this evaluation: it will never replace books, magazines, or newspapers for me.

I love the fact that I am walking around with the complete works of Shakespeare in a device that weighs about the same as a mass-market potboiler. It would have come in handy at our wedding.

Matron of Honor Lynn DuPratt giving her wedding toast at our reception.
Courtesy of www.LittleBlueWorldPhoto.com

Lynn, my maid of honor, was trying to quote what we now know to be the Bard’s Sonnet 116 in her wedding speech toast, but she got no farther than, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments,” before she lost the rest.

It was a very sweet sentiment, and her point was that my husband and I are ideally suited. My friend the English professor was at another table trying to look up the quote on his smart phone to help her out. If I’d had the Kindle then, it would have been easy.

The Kindle is great for instant gratification: with the 3G model, you can have the book you want instantly, and if you were traveling and wanted to read your hometown newspaper, you could. (Well, not my hometown newspaper, but they are infamous for being aggressively neo-Luddite.)

One can carry the Oxford English Dictionary, foreign language dictionaries, travel books, field guides, atlases, your desert-island reading list, the Bible, or the latest bestseller around in your purse or backpack. You need never want for reading material.

I paid .99 for a Kindle book called "Free Kindle Books and How to Find Them," by Michael Gallagher, and it has been very helpful. I learned the hard way that not all free books are alike.

I have found that it is better to pay a nominal fee to get classics than to get them free, because you need the book to be configured for the Kindle to go directly from the table of contents to the chapter you want. 


I downloaded a free copy of "Alice in Wonderland," but soon realized that it didn't have any illustrations, and as Alice herself points out, "what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?"


So I deleted it, and for a little over a buck, got a mobi version that did have John Tenniel's line drawings.


There are lots of books that have been scanned, but they are like reading a PDF; there is nothing interactive about them. 


There are lots of books that I like to quote and refer to, and would love to carry around with me all the time. But there is nothing quite like holding a book in your hands. 


When I commute, I listen to audio books from Audible. For a nominal monthly fee, I get credits good for downloads. I am now listening to Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants." John Lee, the Follett reader, is particularly gifted at mimicry, and his different accents in a book that takes place everywhere during World War I is very enjoyable.

But I find myself wondering how certain words and names are spelled, and long to see the words on a page. I often seek out books on the shelf that I'm listening to just to look at the typography.


I cancelled my trial Kindle subscription to the Los Angeles Times after three days. In the print edition, I am often drawn by well-written headlines to stories I wouldn't otherwise read. Having the whole page laid out to view is preferable to seeing only the section headers, like you do in the Kindle edition. 


Then, when you select a section, you have to fast-forward through the stories you don't like, because they aren't laid out in a way so you can choose them.


One of my other Christmas gifts from my husband was a hardback copy of Pat Conroy's "My Reading Life." It's a lovely little book, with handsome deckle-edged pages in just the right size to fit your hand. I would never want that in a Kindle edition.


I guess that's what it comes down to: fiction that I don't care to keep, like the Follett or Stephen King, is okay for Kindle, because I just pass them on to friends anyway. But those authors who write the lovely and graceful prose I love, like Conroy or TC Boyle, I want to have in my hands and on my bookshelf.


I guess Lynn was right, my husband and I truly do have a marriage of true minds if we buy each other the same Christmas present.