So, having owned my snazzy new Amazon Kindle for a week now, I am going to finally post about it.

For starters, I will note that I have long resisted the urge to buy any kind of dedicated e-reader device. I finally gave in because of the physical space limitations of my current lifestyle.

I grew up in a house where books were everywhere. We had dedicated rooms full of books. I personally had 3 floor-to-ceiling bookcases in my bedroom, and they were full -- not just full like library shelves, but with books piled up horizonally and stacked 3 deep on the shelves. I was used to being able to browse all of those, plus my father's books, which definitely exceeded mine in number, any time I wanted to read anything.

Now, I have a much smaller house than the one in which I grew up. My bedroom is not large enough to support any floor-to-ceiling bookcases in addition to essential furniture, and the living room cannot support both bookcases and a Christmas tree. Since books are essentially year-round items, I have to keep that space at least clearable.

Ever since I married, I have been on an unending quest to narrow down the collection of physical books I have. At first, I skimmed through them and got rid of all the books I disliked, like... well, a great many books. Then it was the ones I was meh about, like my Piers Anthonys and Mercedes Lackeys. Then it was the ones I bought and read out of some bizarre duty to history or society, such as my collection of Jane Austens, of Memoirs of a Geisha. Then it was all the ones I kind of enjoyed and would read if I saw them, but could not imagine myself actively seeking out again. In the last year or so, as we try to prep our "I have nowhere else to pile this crap" room for Lorrie to move into, my winnowing has taken on a truly brutal quality. Instead of taking books off the shelf, I put them ON the shelf. "Would I pay money for this book today?"

I found, on my remaining shelf, a pattern of individual authors taking up lots and lots of space. Orson Scott Card. Lois McMaster Bujold. Robert Sawyer. David Weber. Stephen Brust. Sara Douglass. Lots of people that wrote long series I really, really like.

Then I realized that I own the bloody e-books for around a third of those novels taking up space on my shelf. In desperation, I broke down and decided it was time for an e-book reader.

I expected it would take me a long time to get used to it. It actually took around 30 minutes. Pages are smaller, which is a pain, but page-turning is actually less effort. I love it for while I'm doing other things, like stirring sauces for dinner, because you can't lose your page and it only takes an instant's tap to move on. It didn't take long at all before the second it took for the next page to load to be invisible to me.

There are things I don't like about the Kindle. The main issue with it is that there is not much grip space on it. The buttons for navigation are so big that they don't leave much room for hands. Also, it drives me nuts that on the right-hand side, the next page button covers 3/4 of the side, but it is at the top of the device, so if you are holding it from the bottom, you have to flick your thumb up PAST the back button in order to move ahead. I tend to hold it from underneath, which deals with that, but makes me accidentally punch the next page button from time to time and doesn't give me as secure a grip.

The screen is not fully non-glare: it comes out around like a glossy paperback cover, so if there is a bright light source shining on it, you will see that echoed in it. It has made reading in the car frustrating on particularly sunny days.

It is also very, very bad for the weakwilled: the wireless shop allows instant gratification on purchases, and the 1-click checkout makes everything seem cheaper than it really is.

On the whole, though, I love it. I like being able to flip to another book in a series if I'm reminded of something to look up, and I love the crispness of the display. Paperbacks are getting so flimsy these days, it feels like I can only read them a dozen times before they start to fall apart, and that is really wholly inadequate for me. I also love that new releases are mostly all $9.99, so I don't have to pay hardcover prices for them, just slightly-inflated paperback prices. I like being able to import all of my extensive Baen library, and I think they have a decent, if not superb library growing on Amazon. I am making a point of clicking the little "gimme a Kindle version!" links on all the books I want on Amazon. I'm limiting myself now to my current splurges (the entire Sharing Knife series so far, which I had not yet read) and my existing e-book library. Come September, I'll allow myself another $30 or so for new purchases.

It's weird. In high school and college, I swore by physical books. I hated reading on my computer, and it felt impersonal, somehow, to translate these things to just bits. Now, half of my new books are online audiobooks through Audible.com. And I am in love with the new e-reader technologies. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.