My New Toy

Emily bought me an early Christmas present and gave it to me this week. Thanks to some great salesmanship from friend and colleague, Matt, I got excited about spending some money on a new toy. I love to read, so it wasn't too much of a stretch for me to want Amazon's new Kindle. Emily bought me the 3G version.

I've been playing around with it for a couple of days and already have about 45 books and a few samples. Everything I have has been free, but I'm looking at getting a few multi-volume works for a buck or two a piece. It's amazing how much stuff is out there for almost nothing when there's no more copyright. And I don't read much modern literature, so I've been looking at the classics.

Here are some of the authors I've downloaded so far:
G.K. Chesterton
Howard Pyle
William Shakespeare
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Homer
Plasto
Aristotle
Cicero
Robert Frost
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Jonathan Swift
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Thomas Paine
Benjamin Franklin
Louisa May Alcott
Karl Marx
Albert Einstein
H.A. Lorentz
Alexandre Dumas
Niccolo Machiavelli
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Gaston Leroux
Sun Tzu
Confucius

How much wisdom of different ages and cultures did I just download for free? That Kindle is an amazing device! I am having so much fun with it already. I've read some of the works already, but the vast majority of them are new to me and I'm thrilled I got them for free and now I have a whole library of books in a little device that's physically smaller than the print version of any single book in the collection.

I'm going to be doing quite a bit of traveling in the near future, so Emily was sweet enough to buy it for me before Christmas so I could enjoy it on a few long flights. Thanks Emily! You are so nice to me.

And thanks to Matt for selling me on the Kindle. I think I owe you a commission, pal. Good luck getting it from me, though. :) And to all of you who have been thinking of getting a Kindle and this post pushed you over the edge ... Merry Christmas. I'm not ever planning to make money off this blog, so enjoy your new Kindle and you can thank me later.