Kindle

My dear wife gave me a Kindle 2 for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and it's stone cold awesome. I had assumed that I wouldn't want one of these readers, that it would be just reading a computer screen, which I do most of the day. But this thing is great. It has 19 shades of gray in the screen and uses some kind of "ink font" that comes across more like charcoal on paper than computer font. And I can take and save notes right in the book.

Further, I downloaded the Kindle application for my iPhone, and can now read a book for a while on my iPhone, close it and then open it again on the Kindle itself , where it "whispersyncs" to the page I'd left off. My only complaint is the "experimental section." It supposedly plays music, but it only plays MP3s, not MP4s. I don't want to bother trying to figure out how to convert music just to put it on another device. Better to just listen to an iPod while reading.

The danger of course is that books, just about any new book, are not only a severely reduced prices, but they download in roughly 60 seconds or less.

So far I've picked up seven books. Most recently, I bought Paul Auster's "Invisible." Deceptively elegant book. The only other thing I've read by Auster is New York Trilogy. I finished "Invisible" on the train downtown this morning. Tremendous book.