Kindle

The jury is still out -- as a consumer law prof, I insist on using my 30-day return period to its utmost -- but I am really, really excited about my Kindle. For my birthday this year I received the cheapest of the current available models. The "free 3G" on the more expensive ones would be a neat way for me to pay Amazon for the right to be tempted by their latest offerings even when away from wifi, and as far as I can tell serves no other useful purpose. (Free 3G does not apply if one wants to load one's own documents using cellular service -- there's a charge for that. It only works for loading Amazon documents, which are primarily e-books for which one pays.)

Kindle is easy to use, which is essential for me. It lacks almost all of the neat functionality -- read, distractions -- of a laptop or iPad, which is unequivocally a good thing. Probably partly for that reason, the battery life is remarkable. I'm three days in on a charge, with a couple of hours per day of use, and the meter suggests I am at 80% or better. I can e-mail myself PDFs (to a special Kindle e-mail), load them on the Kindle by turning it on in the presence of wifi, and read them wherever. It's small, light, and easy to carry. This last feature was my primary hope. I am constantly carrying a heavy briefcase -- even a litigation bag -- full of documents when traveling, for the privilege of reading maybe 10% of what I carry. Kindle should solve the sore shoulder problem.

And my reading is better than using paper. First, the part of the page I am seeing is much smaller, so I am not distracted by (e.g.) the footnotes. Second, the note-taking function, which is kind of neat, is hard enough to use that I am not constantly running down tangents in the margins. Few things frustrate me more than cluttering up the abstract of somebody's paper with my own notes and never actually reading the paper. That is the norm for me with airplane reading. On yesterday's flight, I worked through a first read of three very helpful articles in 75 minutes. Now, that is productivity.

I don't envision reading a lot of literature on the Kindle. I like my wall full of books, which is as much my own version of artwork as it is reading material. But I have downloaded a few dozen free public domain e-books, which for some reason are classic horror works that I've not yet read. So around Halloween I'll test it as a book reader!