Reading from John's Blog by John

In the main, this isn’t a post about the iPad, although there’s a bunch of relevance there, and the conclusion mostly is about the iPad. I’ve been experimenting with different reading form factors for digital books over the last few weeks — I’ve of course had my various Kindles (Kindlii?) for a couple of years now, and have basically come to love them. I’ve read maybe a hundred books, at least a couple of over a thousand pages, and would not trade it. It is decidedly not a perfect device, and is…what’s the word?…oh, right: ugly. But it gets a lot right for the way that I use it.

Really good posts about the Kindle Catalog at this blog.

Kindle: my analysis of title availability and pricing from John's Blog by John

But here’s the kicker: of the 23,034 pages of books I purchased last year, 14,871 (64%) could have come to me as electrons instead of dead trees. Now, I’m not being naive — I don’t have the tools to do some sort of eco-analysis on the total energy footprint of the Kindle and servers compared to the relatively-more-efficient-and-developed printing industry. But I do know that there are several 500+ page books that I’m just not reading because they’re too big to drag around. Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, for example, or Winik’s The Great Upheaval, or Follett’s World Without End. And I think with a Kindle, I would start reading them all. [disclaimer: there’s some pricing and page count funkiness because of the timing of the analysis, availability of paperbacks now versus hardbacks then, etc. also, i should note that the real-paper catalog on amazon doesn’t seem to be the same as the kindle catalog — they’ve got lots of sync work to do there. titles were different, searching was different, etc.]

Read the full blog post here.