Kindling

[SecretAgentMa'am]

Originally Posted by June

I was thinking about getting a cover with a built in light, but Medusa said she'd read that they can crack the front! I do think it would be nice if they were backlit, but I understand they are hard on your eyes and the battery life sucks.

I have the cover with the built-in light and I *love* it! There was an issue with cracking, but they found and fixed the problem, so the new covers are just fine with no problems. I can't go to sleep at night without reading in bed, and my wife goes to sleep really early. It's been perfect for us.

I love my Kindle so much. I have the 3rd Gen with 3G and WiFi, and it's fabulous. I'm a voracious reader, and I often have 3 or 4 books going at once, so it's a lifesaver for me. I'm also a student, and every semester there are more and more textbooks available in ebook format. Every huge textbook I don't have to lug around with me is a big plus.

One of the things I love is the ability to read new authors I would have been unlikely to try or even find before. I adore the urban fantasy genre, but there's a lot utter crap to wade through in the genre to find the good stuff. With my Kindle, I can download a sample and read the first chapter or so at my leisure. Way better than trying to find the time to spend hours standing in the aisle of a bookstore trying to decide what I want to spend money on.

Ebooks also make it a lot easier to read authors who are self-publishing. Now, anyone can write a book and publish it themselves as an ebook and charge whatever they decide for it.

Does everyone know about Calibre? It's a great (free!) program to have if you don't want to be married to Amazon for your ebooks. As long as they're DRM-free, you can download an ebook in any format and use Calibre to convert it to a Kindle (or Nook, or whatever) friendly format and get it onto your Kindle. So if your favorite author is only publishing in epub format, it doesn't matter, you can read it on your Kindle anyway. I love it. http://calibre-ebook.com/