Been thinking about picking up an Amazon Kindle ‘Wireless Reading Device’ (aka e-book reader)? Need another credit card? Like saving money? Well, this deal is for you! Apply online for the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card and receive $30 back on your first card purchase. Use the card to purchase a Kindle from Amazon and enter promo code ‘VISACARD’ to save $70 at checkout. All told that’s $100 – $30 back, $70 instant savings. You can get all of the details on the Kindle product page.
And now a little digression…
I’m still on the fence about the Kindle. I think it is interesting technology, but I still like the tactile sensation of reading a book, especially paperbacks. (I don’t know why, but I tend not to like reading hardcover books.) I’ve ready books off my PDAs in the past, and countless pages off my laptop, but it just isn’t the same as settling down on the couch, or in bed, with a real volume of bound up dead tree and reading. The feel of the book, the smell – even if they can reproduce the look of ink on paper the hard plastic shell just isn’t the same.
And I know that’s kind of quaint and silly. I’m happy to dump physical media for music and buy everything in digital formats. I’ve had no qualms about dumping VHS and LD for DVD, and now dumping DVD for BD, and using video downloads when quality isn’t as big of an issue. But I still subscribe to a stack of magazines and I look forward to receiving them each month (or week, for Aviation Week) and reading them. And I still enjoy physical books. I don’t read nearly as many as I’d like, or I used to, because I’m so busy. But I always have a stack of books around to read when I can find or make the time.
Maybe it is because I spend all day, most of my life really, reading text off of a digital screen that I enjoy getting away from that and going back to the simple tech of a book.
Someday I’ll probably be that crazy old man with the house full of dead trees that all the kids talk about. As Blank Reg once said: “It’s a book. It’s a non-volatile storage medium. It’s very rare. You should have one.”
Maybe once they get e-paper to the point where it can be bound into book form it would be more appealing to me. A physical book which can be any logical book, that sounds interesting.
