Monday, January 4, 2010

*mumble-mumble* I bought a Kindle

Welcome to 2010--The Year of the Tenners!  Don't know who the Tenners are?  Go check them out: The Tenners.

The Kindle.  If you've been reading the blog, you know that I am strongly opposed to the device.  Not really the device, but the way they're trying to use it to dominate the market (and the way publishers are allowing them to).  But that's not what this post is.  You can search my old posts and find at least two on my hate for the Kindle and the Nook.

This post is about why I bought both.  My Nook won't be here until February, but my Kindle has been in use for a week...and I am in love with it.  I'd marry it if I could.  I'm not going to sit here and extoll the virtues of the Kindle.  It's everything everyone says it is.  And I can't say anything about the Nook except that I also bought it so that I wouldn't be chained to Amazon's draconian DRM.  But it's ease of use, and weight and ability to buy many books in seconds, that's not why I bought it.

I bought it (and kept it) because I'm poor.  That's right, I'm poor.  I'm a poor, starving artist.  Okay, I'm not starving, and I'm not poor, but I'm thrifty.  I also do revisions on my own manuscripts by hand.  I print them out, sit at a desk with a red ink filled fountain pen, and revise.  I do that because it forces me to make revising a two-step process.  I make changes on the actual page, and then I make more changes when I enter the changes from the page to the computer.  It's a good system for me, but it's also expensive.  For example, right now I'm revising a book called UNDO Button.  It's about 300 printed pages.  By the time I've got it in shape to let my agent look at it, I'll probably print it out 5 times.  That's 3 reams of paper.  Probably an entire new toner for a printer, and a lot of red ink.

But with the Kindle I'm able to load my 300 pages to the device, make notes, and then sit there with the Kindle and enter the notes like I'd do with a printed copy.  Is it perfect?  No.  The notes are kept in a separate file on the Kindle, so if I want to get them off the Kindle, they're divorced from the text they're notating.  That's obnoxious.  But I used it to do my first read through of UNDO Button, and it was brilliant.

I'm hooked.  I've seen the future.  I probably won't use it to buy a lot of books until the publishers work out this whole stupid mess with pricing and DRM and such.  But I have a feeling that all that will change.

So color me a convert.  What do you all think?

4 comments:

  1. I have yet to hear a bad thing about the Kindle. I wish I could try it myself, but I'm still saving up!

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  2. You're the first writer I've heard of who bought a Kindle for editing. Interesting! I look forward to your comparison of the two devices.

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  3. Davin: A friend got one and being able to use it and test it out is what really sold it for me. Amazon is really missing out by not giving consumers a way to try t hands-on.

    Tracy: Get one! Totally worth it.

    Shan: I just really hate continually printing reams of paper for editing. It's not a perfect solution, but it keeps me from going blind on LED's and it replicates my two step process. And for the nook, I recently read that the Nook doesn't allow annotations on any material that you don't purchase from them. That would be a killer for me. So I'm investigating and my cancel my order if that's the case. There are a bunch of e-readers coming out this quarter that feed off the BN store, so there's no use buying something that is crippled.

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