Saturday, September 3, 2011

I Love My Kindle

I don't think I ever posted here that I got a Kindle for Greg's birthday. Don't ask how that works, it's because my husband is awesome.

I was informed that once I had a Kindle I would never use Paperback Swap again. Or go to the library. Having owned it for a little over a month now, I can understand how you get sucked in. But they were wrong.

Don't misunderstand me. I love the Kindle. It's surprisingly easy to use and feels "right." It's way better than reading from the Kindle app on my phone or our tablet. I have no problem reading on it and if the download's free, or cheaper than I can buy it, or not available without a long wait on PBS, then it's perfect.

But I'm still getting books from PBS. You just can't beat free, especially if it's something I can repost and send out quickly for another credit. I've checked a couple of books out of the library, including Ready Player One. It would have been $8 to download and that seemed silly versus FREE. And when I was reading the Song of Ice and Fire series, all of which have long wait lists on PBS, I found the paperbacks were cheaper at Walmart than you could download, by about $2.50 each. I didn't realize this until I was on the 4th one (and they only had 2 of them in stock anyway) so it was the only one I bought in paperback. I've already shipped it out on PBS and got a credit back for it, so double bonus.

The last book in that series is only out in hardback, which is where the Kindle was super awesome. Instead of spending $25-30 for it, it was only $16 to download. Normally I wouldn't pay that much for a book anyway, but when you're 4 books into a 5 book series, you're going to get the 5th book. And thankfully I had $15 in Amazon gift card credit from SwagBucks, so I actually only paid $1 to download it. Score.

In short, I love my Kindle, but I hate paying for books. I have been keeping an eye on the Pixel of Ink blog/FB page to catch free and cheap downloads, but good ones have been a little rare. But if they're free, it doesn't hurt to download some that sound interesting and see. And if they aren't free, I can always download a sample and then buy it if I like it. Amazon has also started a new Daily Deal thing, which POI has been posting about, that I'm hoping will mean more quality books at under $5 prices. I'm all over that.

1 comment:

Allison said...

I love my Kindle too. In fact, I have a book report to do for my New Testament class - we could pick from one of three titles - and I never have time to go by the school bookstore so I bought it for my Kindle. $4! And of course, I can highlight sections and save them so when I get ready to write my report, I can go back and look at the sections I marked and go from there! Never thought I'd use that feature, but never say never.