Bought the $79 Kindle 4 back in late November. Read one whole book on it, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and a few chapters here & there of other, shittier books throughout December.
Haven’t touched the Kindle in a month.
My hope was that it’d get me reading books again — I was voracious up through 2001 or so. But the truth is, I’m not a book reader anymore. Too many of ‘em suck, and aren’t worth the investment of time or energy.
Among the books that don’t, I find I’m baked after 15 minutes: I don’t have any semblance of an attention span anymore. I’m an internet article reader now. In and out in five minutes.
The device itself is a little finicky too. With my extra-large-plus hands, I never found a comfortable way to hold it, to turn its pages, or to peruse the books loaded onto it. Had some accidental page turns, lost my place a few times, that sort of thing. (The placement of the page turn buttons — the one thing that absolutely can’t be wrong — is all wrong. It’s like if your TV remote’s channel up/down buttons were on the side of the device. I was always contorting my hand or thumb to hit the things.)
So don’t buy a Kindle if you’re not already reading lots if books, ‘cos it won’t help you start. It’ll just push you further away.
:(
PROTIP: If you deauthorize your Kindle 4,
- You won’t have to look at ads after a week or so, and
- Amazon will send you coupon codes (10-20% off) enticing you to re-authorize it.
