Now that's a fire

I got myself a kindle. At first when it came out I didn't even consider it. I knew people who were more on the bleeding edge than I am who got the very first version (or the sony in a similar timeframe) and I was very dismissive of the whole idea. I had always been a fan of this application just being on my TabletPC. I could have done that, but I never found titles I wanted and only recently have I started reading things in the public domain.

Then I held one at work. So thin. So light. The case I have for it, I think, outweighs it. My main concerns were around the screen. The whole idea of no backlight seemed really bad. The flash on refresh when you turn a page also was very disconcerting when playing with one casually. However in practice when you're actually reading on it the flash happen when your eye is rescanning from the bottom of the page to the top and the flash just isn't there. The design goal was for the kindle to disappear and I think amazon has made that happen.

The other feature I hadn't counted really liking was the ability to buy a book from the bathtub. Yeah I mean it. The tub. I bought and started reading a novel last night for cheaper than the paper back costs. The sad fact is if I really like it I'm likely to order it again in physical form. Mostly so I can lend it to the boy. That's good for authors, bad for printers, good for trees, um bad for UPS? Oh wait this thing is good for the environment. Shit. I'm against the enviornment this year. (Next year I think I'll be against revolving doors.) Confusion setting in.

Oh, Amazon, what is this crack you've hooked me on?