Light My Kindle

About a week ago I wrote about Oprah declaring the Kindle as her favorite gadget. I was interested to see how her choice would affect one of my favorite blogs, Living Oprah. In case you haven’t heard of it, Living Oprah is a project run by a woman who is following Oprah’s advice to the letter. Everything on her show, her website and in her magazine is fair game. If Oprah says to exercise five times a week, she’s doing it. If Oprah says to buy Celine Dion tickets, she’s doing it (and actually has).

LO (as she signs her posts) had a very interesting day the day Oprah announced the Kindle as her favorite gadget. You can read all about it on LivingOprah.com, but here’s an excerpt:

Oprah told us, “I just love it…” While she, of course, gave them to her audience (each already containing her newest Book Club pick), she told us at home to get one “if you can afford it.” I start to consider how I will broach the subject with my husband when he gets home from work.

LO received a call that her caller ID identified as “The Oprah Show” and was told that an employee was downstairs with a package for her.

I met a woman downstairs who had a wrapped package for me. It’s clearly the same package that Oprah’s audience all opened, containing a Kindle. I looked at this package and said, “I know what this is.” I thanked her and asked her to tell Oprah thank you. I think I also said something along the lines of, “Well this has turned into an odd morning.”

When I got back up to my apartment, I opened the package. There was a Oprah Winfrey notecard with the Kindle. It read:

Enjoy Robin(sic),

Wanted to save you a few dollars on this one!

Thanks for watching.

Oprah Winfrey (This was her actual signature.)

Go to on LivingOprah.com to read the rest of this fascinating post. You won’t believe what happened next.

I’ve been fascinated with the Living Oprah project for a couple of months now, despite not really being an Oprah fan myself. I read it daily, and definitely recommend it to anyone else.

Are there any Oprah fans out there that were influenced to buy a Kindle by her choosing it as her favorite gadget?

The Silicon Alley Insider wrote an article yesterday about the Amazon Kindle starting to pass “the subway test.” The subway test is simply that more Kindles have been seen “in the wild” on subways, commuter trains, and the like.

As a Kindle owner, I’d have to agree. I’ve seen at least a few people on my commuter train with Kindles, including one yesterday evening who discussed her Kindle with me. She’s had it for six weeks and enjoys using it for travel and for reading books that she doesn’t need to pass on to another reader. (I share that sentiment in that I have a hard time reading James Patterson novels on the Kindle because I so often share them with my mother and my mother-in-law.)

Any other commuters seeing Kindles popping up more frequently in fellow commuter’s hands?

My husband is going on a business trip soon, and I told him he should take the Kindle along. He was hesitant at first, despite having read a book on it before. Since he’s been meaning to read Choke before seeing the movie, and I conveniently downloaded it for him within seconds, he was convinced.

Unfortunately, now I’m starting to panic a little. What am I going to do without my Kindle for a week? What if I don’t feel like carrying a “real” book with me on the train? What if I don’t finish the latest issue of Fortune magazine before he leaves?

Obviously, everything will be fine while my Kindle is gone. I’ll finish reading Lisey’s Story and move on to the next “real” book in my to-be-read pile. Fortune will still be on there when he comes back. And my husband will thoroughly enjoy reading the lightweight Kindle on the six-hour plane ride.

However, I feel a little lost without my Kindle (which I’ve talked about before). Much like my cell phone, I get a little anxious when I don’t have it with me. Any other Kindle owners out there feel like this?

Last Friday, I accidentally left my cell phone at home. It was in my sweatshirt pocket, sitting on the floor of my living room. As soon as I realized the cell phone was at home, I regretted not bringing my Kindle with me that day. I had only left it at home because I was trying to get through Lisey’s Story by Stephen King, which I finally started reading in hardcover despite the enormous size of the book.

As I sat at the train station, I kept thinking I would email my husband as soon as I got to work and let him know that I would be unreachable by cell, and to please not wash my sweatshirt. I had a sinking feeling that he, having taken the day off work for his birthday, would be doing laundry. I was kicking myself for not having the Kindle - I knew I could have emailed him from the Kindle and he would have gotten the email on his BlackBerry before he even got home.

Alas, I didn’t have my Kindle. By time I got to work and emailed my husband about the cell phone, the response I received was - “Your sweatshirt and cell phone were in the washer. It’s now drying out on the bathroom counter, but it won’t turn on. We’ll buy you a new one tomorrow. I’m so sorry!”

To make the need for my Kindle even more evident, my train home in the evening was stuck behind a broken down train. Since I had no cell phone, I couldn’t call my husband to let him know. Had I been carrying my Kindle, I could have emailed him, and once again, my BlackBerry toting husband would have known not to bother leaving the house for at least another 45 minutes or so. Instead, he was stuck waiting at the train station for over an hour, worried about why so many trains had gone by but I hadn’t gotten off any of them.

Needless to say, I will not be leaving my Kindle at home anymore.

Julia Keller of The Chicago Tribune wrote a fantastic article about the connection readers feel with books, and why it’s so hard to abandon an unfinished book. She points out that turning off a TV show, walking out of a movie theater, and walking out of a play somehow make you feel less guilty than abandoning a book you just can’t get into.

I know exactly what she means. I have been trying to get into The Ruins on and off for about four months now. I never finished reading Stephen King’s The Stand because I read it when I was eleven-years-old and I was bored. I also never finished King’s short story The Sun Dog (from Four Past Midnight) because I was eleven-years-old and too scared to turn the next page. I never finished The Great Gatsby, even though it was assigned for my tenth-grade English class. And I have a biography of Dave Grohl (lead singer of Foo Fighters) that I put down three years ago and never bothered to pick back up.

All of them make me feel guilty. The author has her own list included in the article, and I’d bet every avid reader has a similar list of books they just couldn’t finish. She points out,

To abandon a book feels all wrong. If you do it, you look around warily, half-expecting to see your middle-school English teacher in the corner, giving you a gravely disappointed glare.

That’s only the half of it, really. While you do feel guilty in that “I didn’t do my homework” kind of way, not being able to finish a book has a stronger effect, at least on me. You know that elated feeling you get when you finish a good book? I get the exact opposite when I think of the books I never finished - I feel like I let myself down. The author seems to feel similarly:

Certain books just don’t grab you. So you let them go. But they never really go away, those cast-aside books, because their forlorn covers haunt your sleep. And sometimes, late at night, you could swear you hear them offering a sad little plea: “Can’t we try it just one more time?”

I have a hope that the Try a Sample feature of the Kindle Store will prevent me from starting books I don’t want to finish. At least I’ll be able to sample the writer’s style and a little of the story before spending money on a book.

You can read the entire article (which mentions the Kindle) on ChicagoTribune.com.

As an avid reader, I’m constantly finding books I’m interested in reading but don’t have time for right now. Pre-Kindle this would frequently result in me leaving Barnes & Noble with a pile of books that would sit in the corner until I got around to reading them. Thanks to the Kindle, I no longer have to spend the money upfront. Using the Save for Later List built into the Kindle, I can add hundreds of titles to my to-be-read list without buying them and letting them gather dust in the corner of my apartment.

[Yes, I realize I also could have written down titles while browsing B&N to save money. However, these lists tend to get lost and don't provide the same satisfaction as a physical pile of books. The Save for Later list, however, feels similar to a pile of books. I can browse it when I want to (and even see the book covers and prices) and when I decide to read it, I can even Try a Sample to make sure I like it before buying. And when I am finally ready to buy, all it takes is a few clicks and the book appears in my hands.]

Here’s how I make sure I get the most out of my Save for Later List:

1. Keep the Kindle nearby when reading the Sunday paper, Entertainment Weekly’s book section, or other book review-type materials. As I browse the weekly Ideas & Books section of The Boston Globe or the Books section of Entertainment Weekly, I keep the Kindle in sleep mode nearby, ready to jump to the Kindle Store at a moment’s notice to add a book to my Save for Later List.

2. Bring the Kindle with you to bookstores. This is easy if you always have your Kindle with you, as I do. A little harder to remember for spontaneous shopping trips, though. While I’m browsing Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, Borders, etc., I keep my Kindle handy, again in sleep mode, in case I see a book that would typically be an impulse buy for me. Within seconds I can look it up in the Kindle Store and add it to my Save for Later list.

3. Browse the new releases and best-sellers in the Kindle Store. You never know what you might find to add to your list. Plus, they may be $9.99 now, but in a few months the price might drop once the book is out of the spotlight.

4. Be prepared to not find your book in the Kindle Store. Sometimes, despite a stock of over 140,000 titles, your book might not be in the Kindle Store. Either the publisher hasn’t made it available yet, or it won’t ever be available. I like to keep a list of these books separately and check the Kindle store for them once in a while.

5. Have a system for checking your Save for Later list. If you don’t check it often, it can get out of hand. I prefer to browse through mine every time I finish a book, that way I have a chance to start a new one from the list if it’s more interesting that the ones I have already downloaded. You may prefer a weekly check, or monthly - use whatever works best for you so that the Save for Later list doesn’t become where your to-read list goes to die.

That’s how I manage my Save for Later list. If you have any tips to add, please share them in the comments.

There’s a wonderful post on the Amazon Kindle Official blog about hiding your reading material by using a Kindle. I can relate, since I read a lot of weird stuff (if you saw the same woman on the train every day and every day she was reading Stephen King, you might start to question her sanity). The author mentions reading He’s Just Not That Into You, which I also read and was embarrassed to be seen reading. However, it was co-written by one of my favorite comedians (Greg Behrendt, who once explained that you can get a man to go anywhere by saying the phrase “There might be cake.”) and I just had to read it. Instead of bringing it on the train like most of my reading material, I read it only at home to avoid being laughed at, even if it was only in my imagination.

The beauty of the Kindle is that you can read whatever you want, and no one can tell. The Amazon blogger says it’s going to allow her to feed her self-help book obsession. For me, it means I can read the new Oprah book club book, despite my dislike of Oprah, and not feel like a giant walking Oprah billboard. Or I can read the murder mysteries with the really grisly titles without feeling guilty when a small child passes me on the train.

In short, the Kindle gives readers an opportunity to read their guilty-pleasure books out in the open. What guilty pleasure books will you be reading on your Kindle?

I’m currently in the process of moving from one apartment to another, and I’ve discovered yet another wonderful thing about my Kindle.

Any time I’ve moved in the past, I took special care to pack a few books to read in with my necessities and to-be-unpacked-first boxes. This time, however, I have a Kindle.

I didn’t hesitate to pack up my entire bookshelf, including my to-be-read pile. I didn’t have to worry about not having reading material, because I have the Kindle and access to plenty of reading material that’s downloadable in seconds.

Have you found a surprising benefit to owning a Kindle? Share it in the comments.

I’m a fan of Facebook, the social networking site that allows friends to connect, share photos, and even play Scrabble. Facebook has a couple of places for Kindle users to connect. You can become a fan of the Kindle, although this doesn’t appear to be an official Amazon-sponsored page.

You could also join the Amazon Kindle Facebook Group which appears to have been started by someone in the Amazon network.

Both the group and the page allow you to discuss with other Kindle owners, but beware the Amazon product spam in the Posted Links section.

Since I received my Kindle I’ve been carrying it with me wherever I go. I always find a minute to read it, while in line at a store or waiting for someone.

Unfortunately, I left it at home one day, thinking I wouldn’t need it. After all, I was spending the day with my mother-in-law and my young nephews. I’d be busy playing Candy Land and going grocery shopping. I wouldn’t have time to read, or so I thought.

While driving from my mom-in-law’s house to my husband’s office to pick him up after work, I realized I was early by about 45 minutes. I thought to myself, “No problem. I’ll go into Barnes & Noble, get a cup of tea, and read my….uh oh.” I didn’t bring my Kindle. I wanted that cup of tea and quiet reading time. But I knew if I walked into Barnes & Noble I couldn’t just sit and drink my tea without reading a book. If I bought a book, though, I’d be adding to the two other books I was currently reading.

I felt lost. Almost as if I had forgotten my wallet at home.

Now I bring it with me as a sort of “when in doubt” policy. If I bring it and I don’t find time to read, it’s only 10 ounces and doesn’t weigh my purse down all that much. If I do find a quiet moment to read a few pages, all the better.