A couple weeks, my brand new Kindle arrived in the mail. Since there's been a lot of talk about e-books lately, I thought I'd write up a little review of it.
Firstly, the Kindle is great. The ease and convenience of being able to buy a book and begin reading it without ever getting up from the couch cannot be over-stated. Similarly, the convenience of the size of the Kindle cannot be over-stated either. It's small and lightweight, but still easy and enjoyable to read on.
But, not everything is great. While the Kindle excels at casual reading, it does not do so well with magazines, newspapers, and textbooks. With magazines and newspapers, I like to flip around a lot, which is currently not easy to do on any electronic device. Also, textbooks don't work well since you frequently need to highlight and jot down notes. While you can technically do both with the Kindle, it's a chore.
Yet, as I said, the Kindle excels at casual reading. The text is clear and crisp; so crisp that it's easy to mistake it as actual paper. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's easier to read on the Kindle than on most books. For one, you can control the size of the font. For another, the font itself is superior to the font in a lot of books.
Moreover, the lightness of the Kindle means you can shift posture a lot while reading, which is something I tend to do a lot. For instance, it's much easier now to read on my stomach or on my back; with a book, my arms would eventually fall asleep due to the way I was sitting / laying.
One problem I continue to have with the Kindle, though, are the price of the e-books. At $9.99, they're cheaper than trade paperbacks and hardcovers, but still slightly more expensive than paperbacks. And, $9.99 is just the starting price; some cost as much as $14.99 depending on the publisher. I have even come across a couple cases where the hardcover was cheaper than the e-book.
This is somewhat made up for by the fact that there are literally tens of thousands of free e-books. If it was printed before 1923, you can get it for free (I'm finally reading Gulliver's Travels now). There are also a lot of authors who purposefully make the e-book version of their book free for one reason or another.
But, I've still bought three books on the Kindle. The thing is, the convenience of not having to lug around a hardcover book is a pretty big convenience (especially while on the subway). And if the book isn't available in paperback yet, you're probably saving anywhere from $5 to $10. That's not much, and it's what kept me from buying a Kindle for so long. Yet, the Kindle is just $139 now, so those small savings can easily outweigh the upfront cost in just a few months.
Then there's also the added benefit of not having yet another book to store away. A problem in my household is that we have books literally everywhere from a first edition of Tarzan to an increasingly ragged copy of Ender's Game (it's been read several times over by multiple people). Making matters worse for me is that my law books are now taking up almost an entire bookshelf. So the Kindle for me is as much a storage solution as it is a reading solution.
Overall, the biggest drawback to the Kindle is mostly technical. There's no touch-screen for one, and though the screen contrast is amazing, the lack of color is disappointing. The lack of a touch-screen can be especially frustrating as it has a great web browser that is unfortunately almost unusable since you navigate using a directional pad.
But, as a reading experience, the Kindle is terrific. If you think you'll miss the "smell" of a hardcover book (I still don't know what that means), then keep in mind that people said the exact same thing when printing presses changed to the low quality paper of today. And if you think you'll miss the "feel" of a book, keep in mind people said similar things about the transition of radio to TV, from black and white to color, from vinyl to CD, and from CD to MP3.
Although, what's great about the relatively low price of the Kindle is that you don't feel pressured to buy just e-books. Rather, I actually bought a hardcover book the other day. So don't think of it like having to make a hard and fast choice; instead, think of it as providing you with more options.
They, as everything else, just aren't for everyone.
Seriously, it smells great. 
