The Kindle : To Digital Books and Beyond
I should make confession – I’m a little obsessed with Amazon.com. I mean, this one website has literally anything you could ever want be music and movies to laundry soap! That being said, every time I would logon to the sight, I would see the same thing on the homepage: The Kindle. I’m a big reader, so I was intrigued from the beginning by this new technology (over the past couple of years it has obviously become old news, but at the time it was the first of its kind). Even if I wasn’t one to pick up a book too often, though, the Kindle would have definitely gotten my attention. After all, when you see a product advertised nearly every day, it gets in your head. I’m not a big fan of McDonalds, but when their rib sandwich makes a comeback every once-in-a-blue-moon, even I take notice. The same is true for the Kindle.
Despite my fascination with this device that allows you to carry hundreds of books around without breaking your back, I was fairly convinced that I’d never actually buy one. When it first came out, it was around $400 – a little more than the average college student has the ability to drop all at once. Nonetheless, I would watch the tutorials and read through the seemingly endless list of features out of pure curiosity without thinking for a second that I’d actually be able to try one out until the technology was at least five years old. Let’s just say that, when I had the opportunity to test one out free-of-charge, my dreams came true.
At first, carrying around the Kindle was almost like carrying around a brand-new, authentic Louis Vuitton bag: it was a status symbol. I could be just introduced to a person and, within five minutes, I would be pulling out “my” Kindle and showing them all the awesome features. It didn’t even matter if they were English majors – they were all fascinated by it. “Let me see it! What does this do? How do you get the books?” Needless to say, I felt pretty cool.
When I finally started looking at the Kindle objectively (or, at least, as objectively as I could manage), I found that, though the Kindle is definitely trendy and convenient, there are many ‘cons’ that would make me hesitate before recommending it to someone. However, instead of a typical list of advantages and disadvantages, I feel like a comprehensive list of the individual features would be more useful to the potential consumer. After all, each feature has both positive and negative aspects attached to it.