I bought my wife a Kindle 2 as an early birthday/mothers day present. I gave it to her a bit early so that she could use it for our vacation to Aruba. It’s definitely a nice little gadget. I’m quite impressed. Excellent battery life. Very easy to read, even one handed. That’s perfect when trying to snuggle an sick infant to sleep.
Julie generally reads about 2 or 3 books a week. More on vacation. Thus, the Kindle helped save a bit of space/weight in the luggage. (important now that they charge $50/bag if you go over their weight limit) Most of what she reads she checks out of the library. However, she does purchase quite a bit as well, especially for just released additions to the series she reads. Those tend to be the expensive hard back versions. Thus, long term, it may save some money, though I doubt it.
I guess the real loser in this will be the Framingham Public Library. They always ended up with the books she purchased when she was done with them. Sorry!
Framingham as in the town in Massachusetts? I didn’t know you were in the (loose) Boston area! I live in Brookline, work in Cambridge. We should grab lunch / coffee / beer / dinner one of these days.
I’m sure she’ll love it too. I got one in February. One caveat to save her some grief on Kindle books. I’m not sure if she’s a fellow tech-nerd, but be careful about ordering books that have code snippets or figures with tables throughout. Most publishers stupidly Kindle-ify those sections of their books as images, which means they are illegible because the Kindle image zoom feature sucks. It’s always best to have Amazon send a free sample of the book to the Kindle and go through that sample to make sure the Kindle version is legible.