Waiting on My Kindle

I have been drooling over the Kindle2 on amazon for a long time now, but I have resisted temptation successfully until yesterday. I finally gave in after several days of having one in my cart and bought it. Now I'm just waiting for my favorite UPS driver to roll up the driveway with it so the real fun can begin.

I love pretty gadgets, to be sure, but that's not the only reason why I wanted to get one. I have thought long and hard about the way I read, and it really made sense to me to get a Kindle. I tend to rip through pulp fiction very, very fast. I can destroy a novel in a day, two if I get really ambitious and nothing else is pressing. It's very tiring to have to try to guess whether or not I'm going to like a new series enough to purchase all the books for it in order to have them on-hand for a big reading spree.

I also ALWAYS have at least one book in my bag. I never go anywhere without a book in case a moment opens up to read. Long trips mean even more books need to be packed, and sometimes I just have the wild urge to read something random. The Kindle weighs less and will be like a portable library in my bag. I'm pretty excited about that. So many of my favorite books are public domain and therefore downloadable as free e-books. The cost of others is less than it would take to get them from our local bookstore, and they'll come instantly.

I made a custom skin for it on this awesome site called skinit.com. I uploaded a pastiche of bookcovers from some of my favorite books to make the skin, so my Kindle will be protected, literary, and colorful. One of my least favorite features of it is the plain whiteness, but that was a fairly easy fix. I always have to customize everything I own, anyway, so I would have skinned it no matter what color it came in. I actually looked at the skins on this site, iStyles, too, but I wanted to make my own, so I did it on the other one.

I got a nifty Janine King carrying case from eBay. The style is really funky in a fabric called Geisha Fans, and I liked it way more than any of the cases on amazon. I decided that it had a lot of personality, and I enjoyed that more than the basic black or leather ones I was seeing elsewhere. I don't know why designers don't understand that people like to tweak things. Is it just me?

I have been surfing for free e-books, and I've been thoroughly astonished by how much good stuff there is. I already have 11 free titles ready to download from the Project Gutenberg offshoot site when I get the Kindle Wednesday including the complete Emily Dickinson Poems, something I often turn to for solace, and a collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories, one of my "feel good" standbys. I haven't even dug around very much yet, either.

Well, I think it's time to start digging for more stuff. My Twitter tweeple have been really awesome pointing out tips. I think this was a good investment in something that I'm going to enjoy for a long time to come.