Amazon sells books, so they make it cheap and easy to fill your Kindle. One-click ordering, wireless downloads, and no coffee bars. Many classic novels are now in the public domain, so you can get them for free. Others cost as little as $2.00, while the latest airport bestseller will run you $9.99.
Reading is also a one-click affair. One button turns the page, another will take you back. As for how it looks, the Kindle's “electronic paper” is easy on the eyes and can be read even in bright sunlight. It still feels like reading on a computer screen, but without all the neon colors and flashing boxes that can make you feel like you're lost in Times Square when you browse the Internet. (Color is coming: the new large-format Kindle is aimed at magazine and newspaper readers, as well as at college students who buy textbooks. If Amazon can pull that off, it may not be long before you see Kenyon students studying on their Kindles along Middle Path.)
Oh, and if your eyes are starting to get old, you can enlarge the font with one click. No need to skulk through the large-print section of your library: Kindle will keep your shameful secret. Or, if you like, Kindle will read aloud to you. You can choose a male or female voice, but neither will ever read you to sleep. (They sound like those robots who do the local forecast on the Weather Channel.)
There's a built-in dictionary for looking up words, and they give you a small keyboard to type in annotations to the text, which you can also highlight or bookmark with a touch of a button. A search function allows you to find text in any book on your Kindle. Great for those identification sections on your English exams!
So what bytes? Well, it's not a book. There's no faint smell of dust and glue to take you back to childhood, you can't fold down the page, and if the author makes you angry, you can't throw it across the room without instant regret.
— SLR