On the last day of each month, I will send out information about books I have bought that month. There might be something of interest or something that keys an interest you have been meaning to work on.
Since Kindle books require little in the way of paper and ink and gasoline and packaging for delivery, I try to keep book purchases to those in Kindle format. Most of the time, the Kindle price is less than the paper price, often much less. Besides,several branches of my family share a Kindle account, dividing the single download price per user even more. As of now, Amazon keeps all Kindle purchases on their computers, from which they can be re-downloaded at any time. Also, book and other sorts of files can be moved from the Kindle to a computer and stored there or on a jump drive or other medium.
A very large number of Kindle books fit on a single Kindle, well over 1,000. That number would be more than enough for most home libraries and for most vacation reading. Besides, from most locations in the US and the world, additional books can be quickly downloaded into the Kindle.
From what I have read, the Barnes & Noble competing product, the Nook, has similar features with the added interesting and attractive one of allowing a Nook owner to loan a book file to another Nook owner. I don't own a Nook but I might sometime, if doing so seems worthwhile.
Being able to switch accurately and quickly from the point of reading in one book to where you left off in another one is another feature that many users appreciate. The Kindle allows the user to mark passages and add notes to readings without having a marker or paper handy.
I have owned a Kindle since April 2008 and in that time have downloaded about 250 books. The count is a little slippery since a few items were purchased by other family members and a few others came from free sources such as Bartleby.com and Project Guttenberg and don't appear in the count that Amazon keeps. My average works out to about a book every 2.9 days. For the sake of sanity and economy, I am beginning a personal project to consciously lower my rate of acquisition. My wife keeps emphasizing the supposed connection between acquiring a book and actually reading it. She and others tend to think that merely having it in my Kindle or on my shelf is not the same as reading it. I counter that even seeing the book often gets me thinking about its subject and sometimes gets me to dabbling in parts of it, even if I don't read it fully.
For this month, I was not successful but I didn't have the limitation project launched until about halfway through the month. I will try harder with the month of May.
