Kindle

After a lot of thought, I decided to buy a Kindle, and included it on the order I just placed on Amazon. I've got a few friends who love them, but I like holding a book in my hands, so I've resisted, until now.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that I just don't have much room on the boat and can't keep very many books. In fact, I had to get rid of a bunch of books when I moved out of my apartment this past spring. The second reason is that it's not very convenient to read books on my laptop, not to mention the fact that it's a power hog.

There aren't that many books that I plan to buy, but there are a lot of older ones in the public domain that I'd like to read. I read several this summer on my laptop that I'd downloaded from sites like gutenberg.org, but I didn't like reading them on my laptop. The Kindle should be much better, especially since you can use it outside. My laptop is useless outside.

I got the 3G model since I'll drop off the net by the end of April and may not be able to easily get to wifi hot spots to connect. But it holds so many books, I doubt I'll be able to read all the ones I plan to load any time soon. The 3G model also works in many foreign countries, so that should help. Maybe I'll even be able to work on my language skills. You can also load all sorts of other stuff, so it'll be a repository for important documents, even charts -- sort of a backup for my laptop.