I have been test driving the Kindle for a couple of weeks now, and wanted to give me feedback regarding the experience.

First, a little background about my personal reading habits.

• I have a compulsion with finishing every book I start, no matter how lame. This forces me to “quickly skim” large portions of some books, but nevertheless, I like to complete them.
• I take notes in my books, especially marking items I want to reference later.
• I’m a bookworm, and I like to be able to read whenever I have a few moments to spare – whether that be in a waiting room, in transit, or sometimes even just on the couch and watching TV.

The Kindle is useful to me first and foremost because it brings portability. I don’t have to lug a book around, I can just keep the Kindle and I have everything at my fingertips. Secondly, it allows me to also read PDF’s on there. This is crucial as there’s lots of PDF format articles and e-books that are in the 50-150 page length range. For me, this is a bit too much for concentrated reading at the computer screen.

Having an e-ink format is much less strain on the eyes.

The only remaining issue with the Kindle is that of note-taking. Granted, there is a feature for marking your book and adding notes for later reference, but I personally did not find that as useful for myself – especially since I often write paragraphs in the margins of books. As I used the Kindle more and more though, I found that I would have to come up with another solution to note-taking because the accessibility of  the Kindle was too much for me to give up. I will mark something in my Kindle if I need to, but I have instead started taking my notes online (using an external app such as Evernote).

One ultimate benefit to the Kindle is that there is a companion iPhone app which syncs your location on the Kindle. So if you read up to page 27 in the Kindle, when you open up your iPhone, it will go to page 27. Then if you read another 5 pages on your iPhone, when you open the Kindle it will automatically be at page 32. This was a major advantage for me and has convinced me to make the switch from buying books (and more bookshelves in my office) to shifting over to the Kindle format of books. In fact, I am considering purchasing the Kindle versions of some of my books and selling the hard-copies to a used book seller.

Another great feature is that you are able to subscribe to magazines (and of course at a much cheaper price than normal). It’s a great convenience to have new issues automatically delivered to your e-reader.

The e-reader market is exploding with lots of new products hitting the market. The Apple Tablet is also sure to revolutionize the category just as they did with the phone. I would definitely recommend familiarizing yourself with an e-reader or two and giving it a test drive. Once you actually use it and finish a book or two on the device, you will start seeing other benefits to its use that will fit your lifestyle.