Kindled

I finally bought an iPad — I stood in line for a few hours to (hopefully) buy one the evening the iPad 2 went on sale. Ostensibly this is a development tool — you can't really develop for a device that's nothing more than a simulator on your desktop computer — but really, I'd just been anxious to use one, after reading about them for the past year.

More than anything else, I find I'm using it for reading. Mostly in Instapaper, which is where I read virtually all of the various newspaper and magazine articles I come across in the course of a day — sooner or later. (They tend to accumulate.) Instapaper provides a very pleasant, mostly distratction-free reading experience, so very comfortable that it's led me to be kinda curious about eBooks.

I discovered that our local library has an eBook lending service (via the county's library system). Once I paid a small fine (left over from 2007), I was able to find a few items of interest — but unfortunately, the selection seems thin. If I want to read eBooks, I'll have to make a few uncomfortable compromises.

I've written before of my love of books — you know, real, physical books. The kind you hold in your hands, feel the pages flip through your fingers. Paper that discolors over time as it sits on a shelf. I don't mind reading books on a digital device, but I haven't yet made peace with the idea of reading them only on a device, owning them only as an idea, rather than as an object. Oddly, I don't have this problem with other forms of media — I just can't seem to get past this with a book. Not yet, anyway.

I've installed the Kindle app for iPad, though, and it is as beautiful and pleasant a reading experience as I could hope for. Amazon foolishly, recklessly, allows free downloads of the first chapter of a book as a sample, and I will (probably) consume as many of them as I can.