For the past few months (about four) I’ve had a Kindle. Of course, I get some free content, from places like Project Gutenberg, or Amazon’s own list of free book sources. I also have some old ebooks that I bought over the years that are not DRM’d, so I can convert them using Calibre or the like into a format that the Kindle can use (Mobi, in case you are interested.)

I love reading on the Kindle. It is small, fits in a coat pocket, looks beautiful, doesn’t strain my eyes (unless I read too much) and is way too easy to acquire new books. In fact, even though I want to try to spend less on books, and I have major problems with ebooks costing about the same as hardcover books when I naturally feel like they should have a lower price structure due to cutting out printing and transportation costs (note that the majority of the overhead probably lies in editing, layout, design, and above all else advertising.) So I have been trying to restrain myself to older titles. But when Tor.com started a poll on best books of the decade, I noticed a few books there that looked interesting.

So I bought The Lies of Locke Lamora. And I read it. Then I bought the next book in the series, Red Seas Under a Red Sky. I really enjoyed the Lies of Locke Lamora, a fun sort of mystery or reverse law and order. Interesting characters, and more humor than I expected. The first novel flowed very quickly, and I had trouble putting it down. The next novel was very good as well, although didn’t seem quite as magical to me. I look forward to the next books in the series, but do not look forward to paying the hardcover (or higher) price for it when it releases soon.

After that I moved on to another book that had been seeing a lot of acclaim lately, The Name of the Wind. That book also was hard to put down and a great read. Its sequel comes out in a few days, and I am sorely tempted to buy it at full price to continue reading about the development and growth of Kvothe. Interestingly, the next two books all share a thread of “Legendary Heroes” of some sort. This book also reminds me of The Misenchanted Sword, which also opens (or ends?) with a legendary hero who puts aside his old life in favor of running an inn. (Also a great read btw.)

Next up was a book that I have been meaning to read for a while: Elantris. This is a stand-alone book by Brandon Sanderson, the author of the Mistborn trilogy. I really liked the Mistborn trilogy, and in particular the well thought-out and developed magic system. Elantris is a book that he wrote before the Mistborn series apparently, and also has a well-thought-out magic system. The protagonist is also someone who will become legendary (I imagine) in his world, and is generally a stand-up hero. All three of these books (not the first two) have heroes that are probably written in order to be very, well, heroic. And that is fine by me; I read my fantasy for an escape from the morally ambiguous difficult world we live in. It isn’t that I don’t like more realistic political stuff (I have been reading George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire) but I also enjoy more fun fantasy with clearly delineated good and evil characters.

After Elantris, I read The Warded Man. The kindle version of this book is a steal at $5.99. I’ll have to pick up the sequel which is down to $4.39 for the Kindle. This book has another interesting magic system (well, rules around magical wards, not so much full on fireball throwing wizards, but lots of demons) and another strong protagonist that passes into legendary status.

So I’ve read enough books on the Kindle now that I know this is a dangerous device: it gets me reading more, and I don’t have the time for that. It is keeping me up late, and eating into my free time, when I should be programming or writing blog posts. It is so easy to take around that if I find that I have a few minutes, I can pull it out and read, and then my few minutes turns into a half hour. Really all that means is that I need to get more self control. I’ve found that I can wait in between books, but once I get involved in a good one, I have a hard time putting it down.

Other things about the Kindle that are great: I like changing the font size. It makes it easy to read. A few times I’ve run into problems with the DRM and publisher set restrictions on the device. For example, I tried the text-to-speech feature while I was reading Elantris. I was cooking dinner, and over the course of the two hours that I was prepping and cooking, got a good portion of the book read to me. That was great. Unfortunately though, some of the other books have had that feature disabled by the publisher. I wanted to go to the store and have the book read to me while I was shopping, but I couldn’t do that. (I had to consume a podcast instead.) The text to speech feature is nothing that would replace an audiobook version of the book. Actually, I don’t know if that is true; I would never buy an audiobook because I can read faster than I can listen, and I don’t want to be tethered to an audiobook for an extended period of time. Using the text to speech feature for short periods is really great though.

I’m also a bit worried that I am now tied to the Amazon ecosystem for books. That doesn’t really worry me too much, because I like Amazon and I think they have my interests as a customer at heart (note: I do work at Amazon, but I am not speaking for them.) The books that I have that are DRM’d though can’t be moved to a new reader in the future. I hope I don’t have to ever do that, but I have already brought ebooks over from at least two platforms in the past (my Palm Pilot, Treo 600, and OLPC.) So I am hopeful that Amazon will be able to move to a non-DRM’d platform in the future, but until then the DMCA should give me the protection to break encryption in order to view the files on other devices. I think. Actually I’m really very clear on that, but I think it is something I should be able to do. I’ll have to spend some time looking into the legality of it. For the time being though, I’m very happy using the Kindle.