Amazon’s e-book reader – the Kindle – is, at least in my opinion, very close to the perfect product. Certainly, as someone who reads a lot I must be fairly close to the Amazon marketing men’s target customer. Typically, I expect to read an absolute minimum of a book a week – and it’s quite common for me to have one novel, one non-fiction and a number of reference books under scrutiny at any one time.
I doubt if that’s atypical – or else conventional paper books wouldn’t sell as well as they do. It does mean that I spend a hefty amount of money on books though. As well as the cost incurred, my book collection can quickly expand and wind up occupying a fair bit of physical space. Once in a while I take the time to sort through my collection and, putting reference books and any particular favourites aside, have a good clean out. Generally the books wind up with family, friends or charity shops – so at least someone gets the benefit of them.
Recently, just before moving house, I got rid of more than fifty volumes. It wasn’t until I saw them gathered and packed to go that I realised I was looking at a spend of something between $500 and $1000 – accumulated in less than twelve months.
The Amazon Kindle is a fairly high ticket item itself of course, but the downloadable e-books on the Kindle webiste are generally a fair bit less expensive that the conventional printed equivalent. That’s only to be expected. After all, there are no printing or distribution costs and Amazon doesn’t incur any postal charges. Even a saving of just a few dollars per book – which seems perfectly achievable – would mean that anyone who reads on a regular basis could pretty quickly offset the price of the device and then start to actually save money.
Apart from financial considerations there are other benefits offered by the Kindle. The Kindle 2 has the capacity to store about 1500 books in its memory. The DX stores even more – around 3500. That’s a small library that you can now carry around with ease – and you save on storage space in your home or office as well.
The Kindle is also more environmentally friendly as it saves on paper, chemicals, water and CO2 emissions due to distribution are considerably reduced.
Of course, the benefits achieved will vary from user to user. They will probably depend chiefly upon the number of books that any one individual buys and reads each year. However, for keen readers it does look like the Kindle offers a number of advantages which would more than justify the initial cost of the device.
Learn more about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and find out how to save money by getting free Kindle books.
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Tags: Electronics, E Book Reader, Physical Space, Postal Charges
