This past weekend I finally had the chance to fire up my new Kindle 2. I had gotten the latest iteration of Amazon’s digital reader for my birthday, but I hadn’t really had the time to use it. Now suddenly, my husband and I found ourselves traveling on a coach bus for three days as chaperones for our son’s school Drama Club trip to New York to see some shows. Plenty of spare time to break out the Kindle. And, I have to tell you, it was such a pleasure to be able to read a new novel, the Sunday New York Times, and the Huffington Post, all without having to lug around a heavy book, a huge newspaper and my laptop. And if I didn't like what I was reading, I could simply download something else - and all from our noisy bus as we sped down the expressway towards Manhattan.
So what was the reading experience like? Well, I have to say that there's a bit of an adjustment for the eyes. I am told that we read differently on a digital screen than we do on a paper page, and that certainly was my experience. I found that reading on a Kindle was a bit laborious, at least until I settled in. I think that as I read along in a paper book or print newspaper I tend to scan ahead a bit, but with a digital page the size of the Kindle's, and having to wait for the "next page" button to respond, you really can't scan ahead all that easily. So it feels as if you aren't “dashing ahead” with your reading the way you usually do. However, that being said, once I got used to the Kindle I began quickly to adjust to its quirks - the way you adjust to, say, a new car. Okay, it's not exactly like your old car, but it works fine once you're accustomed to it.
I found navigating the Sunday Times a snap, to my surprise. There was a nice "sections" menu, and then a list of articles, so it was very easy to move around. I'd never have previously said that I'd ever read a Sunday paper online. Another very happy surprise came in reading the novel. I was starting Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the opening of the book was a bit hard to get into because it was full of Dominican history and references that were only partially explained by Díaz's footnotes.
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