The new Amazon Kindle e-book reader is, in my opinion at least, a dream come true. I freely confess that, as someone who counts reading among my main hobbies, I must be pretty much Amazon’s target market. Typically, I would expect to read, as an absolute minimum, one book each week – and it’s not so very unusual for me to have one novel, one non-fiction and a fair number of reference books under consideration at any one time.
I don’t think that’s so really uncommon, otherwise traditional print books wouldn’t sell so well, but it does mean that I can spend quite a bit of money on books. Aside from the financial side of things, my library of books does tend to take up a fair bit of space at home. Every so often, I go through the assorted volumes and, putting the reference books and any particular favourites to one side, have a clear out. Typically the books will go to charity shops, friends or relatives.
I recently got rid of over fifty volumes in advance of moving house. It wasn’t until I looked at them, bagged up and ready to go, that I realised I was looking books with a value of anything between $500 and $1000 - and this was less than twelve month’s worth of reading material.
Now, whilst the Amazon Kindle is a pretty costly item in itself, the downloadable e-books from the Kindle store are usually quite a bit cheaper than the printed equivalent. After all, there are no printing or distribution costs for the book’s publisher and neither are there any postal charges for Amazon. Even with a saving of just a few dollars per book, quite achievable it seems, anyone who reads on a regular basis would pretty quickly recoup the cost of the device and then start saving money over time.
The potential benefits aren’t just financial. The Kindle 2 has memory capacity for around 1500 e-books whereas the Kindle DX, which will started shipping on June 10 2009, will store 3500. That’s a lot of books – and a lot of physical storage space that will no longer be taken up in your home or office.
Some users have suggested that the Kindle is a green, eco-friendly, device – based upon the fact that it will save on the usage of paper. It’s easy to see the logic, but obviously some consideration needs to be given to the materials used in production and also the manner in which the device will be disposed of when it reaches the end of its useful life.
The actual benefits achieved will vary from user to user and will probably depend chiefly on how many books are bought per annum. All the same, for regular readers, it seems that the Kindle has a number of distinct advantages which should more than offset the initial cost.