Until two weeks ago, I was one of "those people."  You know the type.  The ones that turn their noses up at e-readers and are horrified at the idea of a world without ink and paper.  They run home after such confrontations and seek solace in their stacks of newspapers and magazines while fondling their leather-bound first editions.  Their eyes flutter closed when they get a whiff of that new-book smell and  the crackling sound of a hardcover book the first time it's opened makes them feel all warm and...  

...Ahem... Sorry.  

You get the idea.  Somewhere between losing myself in the worlds of novels and getting threatened with expulsion if I dared make the tiniest pencil marks in my French book in junior high, I fell in love with my preciouses.  I don't just love reading, I love my books and like any good book fetishist, I've been more than a little leery of the Kindle and it's lesser (cheaper) brethren.
 
When avid-reader friends of mine starting proselytizing on behalf of the Kindle, I politely turned away.  E-readers are fine for some.  The editor or reviewer who reads books for a living, the globe-trotting gal who cannot lug volumes of literature across the Swiss Alps and the Oracle DBA who needs scores of manuals at her beck and call on a daily basis could use a handy little device instead of a real book or two.  Amazon just announced the Kindle DX, a bigger Kindle designed for college students and other text-book needing folks.  This all makes sense, but ask me to imagine a world where I was largely book-less?  Forget it.  That's like imagining a world without CDs or VHS tapes or...  I didn't care how ludicrous the arguments sounded. I love my books dammit, and nobody's going to convince to give up that feel, that smell and interface with something as unfeeling and impersonal as a computer screen.

And then I touched one.

Two weeks ago, I picked up the first book in a series and decided that as much as I wanted to read more, I didn't want to invest the cash in what was going to be a rather disposable set of books.  I mean, I love books, but I also love money.  I began searching for an alternative to buying the whole series.  Before I could check out that library thing (but you have to give the books back?), a friend offered to loan me her first-gen Kindle (K1) while she caught up on some hardback books.  I was skeptical but curious, so I decided to give it a try.

I quickly fumbled my way to the included "how to use this Kindle" manual and somewhere in the introduction chapter I knew that I was never going to be the same. Over the course of the following week, as I got to know the Kindle and glutted on fiction at my fingertips, I was completely won over.  I read in the car, at the gym, on my couch, in bed, in direct sunlight and using a tiny overhead light. I read with my contacts in. I read with my glasses on.  I tried to read without any vision-correction, but even the largest font size was no match for my horrid eye sight.  I finished 7 books in 6 days, which is roughly 2100 pages, and I had absolutely no issues with eye strain or neck aches or anything else that one might expect.  I also found that as easy as the Kindle was to hold on its own, the slick leather case with fuzzy suede-like lining was a great sensory addition.  Book-like and yet very much its own thing. I am still a bit stunned at how much it looks like a page of a book slipped under a small screen that gets replaced with the next one at the push of a button. The conversion to Kindle-reading was so seamless that I found myself occasionally trying to "flip a page" at the screen. When I finished one book I just opened the next file.  I sped through the series partially because I couldn't imagine loaning it out to someone and not worrying and wanting every moment it was gone. I had to finish and get it back where it belonged.

And so it came to pass that I was converted as surely as a PDF file. Within the first few hours I was plotting the path to ownership, and when I realized that Mother's Day was almost two full months ahead of my birthday, the campaign began in earnest.  I researched, confirming that the newer, sleeker K2 was what I was after despite its lack of SD card or replaceable battery. I lobbied, citing the ease of use in the gym and an upcoming trip as an excellent reasons not to wait for the birthday.  I bargained, because as fabulous a mother as I've been over the past year, Mother's Day is simply not celebrated with grand gifts where I come from. After a week of this, my husband confessed that he'd expected I was going to love it and want one, had identified Mother's Day as the nearest buying opportunity, and just needed me to pick out a case. He's awesome like that.

As we speak there's a K2 sitting in a little cardboard shipping container a few feet away from me. But it's not Mother's Day yet and as much as I'm a whore for instant gratification, I'm a stickler for rules and Mother's Day is still a few days away.  

Until then I will just sit here and pine and start pre-writing my review.

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