I confess. I’m a gadget freak. I always have been. I started using PDAs when they were in monochrome; I was first on my block to get a DVR.  My laptop and I are connected at the fingertips (or at least it seems that way most of the time.)

And I’m an avid reader. My husband and I have a library of more than 1,000 books (I lost count after that). My nightstand and the floor next to it are piled with a heady combination of fiction and non — a mix of the classic, the absurd, the political and the tense; I can’t travel without at least two or three novels thrown into my carry-on bag. Just as I can no longer travel without my computer in tow. The gadget freak meets the reading addict.

So, it is with great anticipation that I await my brand new Amazon Kindle, just announced this morning by Amazon.com as the perfect marriage between book and technology. It should be delivered tomorrow, so the verdict (as far as I'm concerned) is still out.  But the device is being released right on schedule for me.

My middle-aged eyes are beginning to lose their near focus; and I've discovered that I need three different powers of reading glasses to function.  Large-type books are just too clumsy and heavy.  I'm not a big fan of audiobooks unless they're read by Hugh Laurie (OK, or Jeremy Northam).  

I’ve been considering the purchase of an e-book reader for about six months; I’ve read all the reviews; been to all the forums and discussion groups. Sony has one (just introduced in its second generation); Bookeen just introduced the Cybook Gen3; there’s the Illiad and a few others. All are pretty pricey, but worth it if they do the job(s). For me that means portability and ease of readability.  And one of the good things about e-book readers is that you can adjust the size of the font from normal to super-large with the click of a button. Perfect.

Some people use their PDAs or cell phones as e-book readers, and I even tried that at one point. Although the type was clear, and it was a weird reading experience to have my book in that little three-inch display. The type was too tiny and the background too bright to be comfortable for an afternoon’s good read curled up on the sofa. Making the font bigger and easier to read completely screwed up my reading experience, requiring me to constantly scroll this way and that.