Get Yourself a Kindle (or something similar)

My husband bought me a kindle, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. You should get one. Or something similar.

Here’s why I love my kindle:

1. The screen does not hurt your eyes. It’s made using electronic paper, which means it uses an ink-like substance combined with electrodes or magnets or something and every time the screen changes, the ink blips kind of like clearing an etch-e-sketch (if you’re old enough to remember those things – do they make them anymore?)  In other words, it’s not like a computer screen, which requires light in order to work.  There’s also zero glare.
2. It has already paid for itself at least three times over. If you’re buying recent, popular titles, the prices are going to be about the same as what you would see in a bookstore, but you can find some of the really old classics for less than two dollars and sometimes for free.
3. You can get blogs and newspaper articles and magazine articles delivered daily directly to your kindle. Sometimes before they are available in print.  Sometimes for a fee.  I don’t use this, because I don’t read blogs or newspapers or magazines regularly.  But the capability is there!
4. You can email PDF files and TXT files (and other files, I think) to your kindle for $0.15 each. If it’s a TXT file, it functions pretty much the same as a regular ebook.  If it’s a PDF, it’s more like trying to look at a picture that happens to be of text instead of an image.  That’s the extent of my experimentation so far.
5. You can download music from your computer to listen to while you read. The kindle has speakers and a headphone jack.  You do have to convert your music to MP3 format.
6. It has a read-a-loud feature. True, it’s a robot voice, and nowhere near as dramatic as some audio books can be.  On the other hand, the robot voice beats some of the audio book readers I’ve heard in the past.
7. You can download audio-books. But you have to send them to your PC first, because the files are so huge.  I just use the robot voices.
8. You can organize and categorize your books however you want and search by title.
9. It comes with the New Oxford American English Dictionary, and if you scroll to the first letter of any word in any ebook, it will automatically look up that word in said dictionary and give you the definition at the bottom of the screen.
10. You can create bookmarks and notes anywhere in the text. This also works with TXT files you email to your kindle, but not for PDF files.
11. You can download kindle for PC for free and read everything there that you also have on your kindle. For free.  Anything you read or write on your kindle for PC program is immediately available on your kindle as well.  For free.
12. It has a simple web browser. I was going to get internet on my cell phone, but now I’m thinking I don’t need it, since I carry my kindle with me everywhere and it has a decent web browser that will do most of the things I would need it to do when I’m away from my laptop.  Like check my email or look something up on google or wikipedia.  For free.
13. You can read anything at any time. If you happen to be away from your personal library and you want to read a mystery, it’s there.  If you’d rather read science fiction, that’s also there.  If you want to read a story book, you have that too.  Your entire library is available at your fingertips at all times.  No matter where you are.
14. The battery lasts forever if you keep the wireless turned off when you’re not using it.
15. It has wireless 3G access. Everywhere.  For free.
16. It’s linked to your amazon.com account. So it uses your amazon.com billing information and you can opt to use one-click payment when you buy stuff.  For free.  Even when you’re “buying” free stuff.
17. You can get free samples of just about everything. And buy it later.  Or delete the free sample.
18. You can download sudoku and other puzzle books. Although playing them is tricky.  It’s almost not worth getting them.  But the capability is there!
19. You can delete anything from your kindle, to save space, or because you don’t want to read it anymore, but Amazon.com will keep it on file for you in the infinite space of the internet, so that if you ever change your mind, you can download it right back without having to pay for it a second time.  This does not apply to free samples.  Those disappear when you delete them from your kindle.
20. It has enough space to hold up to one-thousand, five-hundred books. That’s my favorite.  Let me type that again.  It has enough space to hold up to one-thousand, five-hundred books.  If I ever own one-thousand, five-hundred books, I might just die of happiness, if old age doesn’t get me first.  If you’re some kind of god and happen to own more than one-thousand, five-hundred books, you can archive them infinitely on that amazon.com magic internet space thing, and download them back to your kindle when you want to read them.  So, really, it’s more like there’s infinite space for an infinite amount of books…

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some reading to do. 

First Writers Conference Ever! (Part One)

The AIW Annual Conference was amazing!  I officially suffered withdrawal the other day. Some of the panels were better than others. When I have more time, I’ll go through my notes and post more about my favorite things and all the things I learned.

This week, I will share the best thing about this conference. One of the literary agents I met for a pitch session requested the first three chapters of my manuscript!  I guess all that practice work with the pitch really paid off! I let her know that it’s done but I’m still polishing it and I’m swamped until the end of the school year, and she said that I should finish polishing the whole thing before I send her the first three chapters and that the offer never expired and I should just put the name of the conference in the subject line so that she could set it aside and read it sooner than everything else that ends up in her inbox.  It was such a delightfully uplifting experience!  The other two agents I talked to both said that they liked the idea but that they already had similar pieces and didn’t want to take on another one.  It is so relieving to finally meet an agent in person and have a full conversation with them, even the ones who didn’t request anything.  It’s true what they say about agents, you know:  they really are human, just like the rest of us.