I got a Kindle for Father's Day, and I love it. Not just because I can make the type as big as I want, allowing me to read without glasses for the first time in years (although that is nice). I love it because it, used in conjunction with the great wealth of old books available free online, has opened up the nineteenth century for me. I spent hours this weekend scouring the web for the Victorian classics, and downloaded Richard Francis Burton's account of his journey to Mecca, along with his wife's famous biography of him, George Rawlinson's monograph on the Assyrian kingdom, and the complete 9-volume set of Lord Byron's letters and journals. Yesterday I sank into Byron and I don't know when I will emerge. You can, of course, buy the complete Byron in paperback. The pages will certainly be laid out better than in the sometimes confusing etext, and the notes are probably better, but it costs $199. More important, it takes up a foot of space on your bookshelf. I long ago reached complete saturation of all my bookshelves, so keeping a new book requires discarding an old one. My Kindle gives me space for a thousand new volumes, and those that remain available online can readily be deleted in the knowledge that they can be downloaded again whenever required.
I love paper books, but without access to the sort of library that owns Byron's letters and Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, I often can't find something that I feel like reading. I think that the Kindle has solved that problem for me, forever.
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