For a long time, I’ve been one of those rather pragmatic people who dismissed e-Books.  They’re expensive, and it’s hard to be much more convienient then paper.  Paper is cheap.  It is durable.  It is pretty easy to read.  Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, it’s been pretty hard to beat.

But, being a man of disposable income, and an early adopter, and always looking for yet another chunk of hardware to haul around, I picked up an Amazon Kindle 2 about a month ago.  Actually, I had to have it shipped to someone in Mountain View, and have one of my coworkers bring it to my in Australia.

Actually, I didn’t get it just because it seemed like a cool gadget.  Ostensibly, I’m trying to cut down on having to either haul books back to the states when I return, or get rid of them.  This should help.

Anyway, the thing is pretty awesome.  It’s small and lightweight.  It is very legible (although not in the dark, but then neither are the books for which it stands in).  And what’s more, I’ve already put a pretty tall stack of books and magazines onto it.

Right now, one downside is that since I’m well out of range of the nearest “Whispernet” network, I have to manually download files from amazon.com and copy them onto the Kindle, but that’s pretty easy.  I do kind of look forward to being back in network range, when my subscriptions to Time and Analog will magically show up.  It’s also a bit small, although with the print size that I read (with my 34-year-old eyes), I can get just a bit less on a page then a typical trade paperback, which is fine.