Writing Near Hills

One of the best purchases I’ve made in the last year was my Kindle. As I’ve mentioned, I tend to buy too many books. And they sat in my house, crowding us out. Over the course of 2008, we got rid of almost all of our books and got two Kindles. And things have been different.

First, I actually read more now. The Kindle is really fun to read, compared to the average book. The text is clear (and can be adjusted to be larger or smaller), the book selection is ok, and I can let it sit on my lap without having to hold it open.

Second, it obviously saves an awful lot of space. I must have bought at least a shelf’s worth of books for the device, but it remains tiny. I haven’t had to think about where to put a single one of the books I bought, because they are all stored either on my Kindle or in the cloud by Amazon.

Those two things combined actually made a difference in how we approached buying our next house. We didn’t need to be overly concerned with having tons of room for bookshelves, as we default to buying books on the Kindles when they’re available. An unexpected change was that we’re considering going without a TV altogether, as we spend so much more time reading that the cost of a TV, and the space it would require, are on the edge of not being worth it. As a result, we could shop for a smaller house, relative to what we would have wanted if we were going to fill the house with books and a TV.

The Kindle is fairly expensive, but it may have saved my wife and I hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house.

I do have one criticism of the Kindle, which they are already addressing. The book selection is still nowhere near what I would need for a complete replacement for paper books. Lots of old books are missing, and even some recently released books don’t go on the Kindle (such as Nixonland, which I bought in hardcover recently). When I got my Kindle I think Amazon was advertising that they had over 90K books on the Kindle and it is now over 120K, which is great progress. But I don’t think I’ll be really happy with it until it hits several multiples of where it is now.