eBooks, Amazon and otherwise

I have just finished reading all "The Song of Ice and Fire" books published to date. They were excellent. George RR Martin does an incredible job of building a world, peopling it with characters both fair and foul, and telling a big story using scenes that build on each other over time. Hints are dropped, plots are planted, story seeds that bloom in blossoms both beautiful and terrible. These are adult-level fantasy stories; there is corruption, the morality is typically gray, and a character you hate may turn out to be someone you like, then someone you hate again.

That is no surprise: I read a lot. The surprise is this:

If I had not had the opportunity to read these books in a digital format, I very much doubt I would have ever finished them.

There's a lot of people who swear they'd never read a digital book of any kind, in any format. I read the Song of Ice and Fire series on a ipod Touch, which is a device roughly the size of an iPhone. The screen was not very large, but due to the awesome work done by the people who put together the Amazon Kindle iPhone app, I could easily read the words. Each screen was a tiny amount of an entire "page" but I could page through the little screens very, very easily.

The best thing about the reading, though, was this: my book was always with me. In line at the supermarket, the bank, on the train, for my lunch break at work, laying down at the end of the day, whenever I had a few minutes I could quickly and easily pick up exactly where I left off and read.

I heartily recommend the Kindle app, because it takes an already useful item (the ipod Touch in this case) and makes it even more useful and entertaining. Don't knock it before you try it!

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  By pixiestash, November 3, 2009 @ 9:37 am

  I was one of those people who thought they had no use for an ebook reader...but I love, love, love my Kindle. It kills me that they are now $100 cheaper than I paid last spring, but I have gotten a ton of use out of it.

  I don't use the iPhone app a lot, but it's surprisingly easy to read for such a small screen, and it's nice to have when I need it. I just have to remember to turn my Kindle wireless on every so often so that it syncs properly.

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  By Kris Johnson, November 3, 2009 @ 10:06 am

  I'm one of those "I'll never read a book on an electronic device" people, but I think I'm slowly starting to see the merits of the medium. I can't read a book on my PC; it just doesn't work for me. But I've held a Kindle (or maybe it was a Kindle 2) in my hands and flipped through a couple of pages, and I could see the appeal. I even started reading H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE on my Treo 650 before 'twas rendered inoperable by hasty contact with an unyielding surface. Marry up the readability of the Kindle with the uber-portability of a smartphone and I might just become a convert.

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