Garth George: hooked on electronic book

A few weeks ago in a column about libraries and books, I mentioned that my wife and I gave each other for Christmas a Kindle electronic reader.

What follows may be old hat to some, but to my wife and me this device has been a revelation. What an astonishing piece of equipment it has turned out to be.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, an e-reader is a mini-computer designed to acquire and store books, magazines and even newspapers.

Our Kindles measure 19cm deep by 12cm wide, with a screen 12cm deep and 9cm wide, complete with computer-type keyboard and weighing about the same as a regular paperback book. Into this little piece of magic we can each load up to 3500 books, enough to fill a small suburban library - on top of the dictionaries and user guides which are preloaded.

Our Kindles are tied to amazon.com, from which we have been buying conventional books for years - much cheaper than buying from bookshops here, even when exchange rates and postage are taken into account.

Amazon has 950,000 e-reader books available to buy, and another million free. Among the free downloads are most of the world's great classics - Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Trollope, Jane Austen to name but a few.

The other night I logged in to Amazon on my laptop (the keyboard on the reader is a bit small for my big fingers but can to the job, too), called up a book I wanted to buy and clicked a button on the screen. I did that three more times for three more books.

By the time I strolled back to the lounge from the study, all four were loaded in my reader via our wireless internet connection - at a cost of about $25, charged automatically to my credit card.

But I have also called up Amazon from my armchair. Having, for instance, read the first of a trilogy by an unfamiliar author, at the touch of a button on my Kindle I have had the second and third books downloaded immediately.

To read them, all we have to do is start the device, click on the relevant book - and there it is on the screen.

Page turning requires a mere touch of a button without moving my hands and if I put it down for an hour or a day in the middle of a read and the device turns itself off, when I restart it, it will open at same place I left it.

This incredible gadget has all sorts of other functions to make reading easy.

Amazon reports that it sells 105 Kindles for every 100 conventional books and statistics from the United States reveal that at least half of the owners are 50 or over and a quarter aged 60 to 80.

I can understand that. The readers are particularly good for older people since they can change print size at the touch of a button and, for those with damaged hands, using one is easier than turning pages in a conventional book.

You can never permanently lose an e-book.

Annoying as it would be to drop your e-reader in the bath, or leave it on a bus, once bought the books you have downloaded are always yours, available to re-download free.

Best of all, perhaps, even those of us who are limited in our understanding and operation of computer gear find e-readers are pretty simple to use.

Getting an e-book doesn't mean printed books become a thing of the past.

Novels by several of my favourite authors are not yet available in Kindle editions so my visits to the library, while less frequent, are still necessary.

But when I go on holiday, I will have to take only one "book".

garth.george@hotmail.com