A Kindle trick changes the reading experience

The reader could write a simple script to replace "heart in his mouth" with whatever metaphor he wanted.

The sheer hatred for this device staggers me. It's become a joke! People who've never used one call it ugly. They call it a waste. It's become a joke of the industry, and I have no clue why. It's selling well, isn't it? It's just selling to a niche audience of people who actually read things. So I guess the joke has to do with the implied functionality, like your wonderful joke implies.

I am an astute reader. I own a Kindle to go with my miniature library. I enjoy cuddling up with my Kindle just as much as I would with any other book. The screen is gorgeous. The device is gorgeous. I've never understood the mockery. No, it doesn't feel "high tech" and gleaming, it feels very down-to-earth. It feels like a book ought to feel.

Now, I'm the sort of person who likes Shakespeare. And it's much easier to have The Complete Shakespeare on a Kindle than it is to have it in a backpack. I also have The Complete Asimov, and I'm considering The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Kindle got me into reading P. G. Wodehouse for the first time, because his stuff was free on Gutenberg. I managed to find a complete archive of Diana Wynne Jones stories: they're for teens rather than adults, but they're still very well-written and they're childhood favorites and I like that I can find them and read them when I couldn't purchase half of them physically on Amazon.

When I got to a meet-up an hour early, I had my Kindle, and I could go and search for half a dozen novels and read excerpts from each one. It's like window shopping but you can do it anywhere.

Not to mention the free wireless Internet I get everywhere, the NowNow asking feature (which I've used several times to get quick feedback on projects), and the music player, which I've loaded with Bach, and which isn't a brilliant player but which makes for pleasant background music while I read. I value my Kindle more than I value my iPod.

So, you who would mock the Kindle, try planning out a 7-hour train ride when you read books often at the rate of one every 90 minutes. Try figuring out a better way to store 200 books in a dorm room without cluttering everything to hell. Try making a physical device that does as much, as unintrusively and as beautifully as the Kindle does. Then mock it. But I don't hear the Kindle users complaining, and isn't that the important thing? The fact that the people who actually use the Kindle enjoy their product a lot?