Traveling with the Kindle

Short review: Big fan!

Slightly longer review: In transit may be the perfect place to use a Kindle and its major advantage over paper books, whose tactile experience is still pretty damn special to this author. I could merrily click away knowing that if I were to finish all my downloaded books I had access to BOOKS FOREVER if I wanted to buy another. Because I wasn't switching back and forth between paper and screen, as normally happens when I'm reading something on the Kindle, I didn't get that jarring feeling.

I'm not saying I would burn all my books for it, but I see the utility, particularly for people I know who travel a lot for work. Also, I was somewhat isolated on this trip, and if I had had to run out and get another book (heaven forbid) I might not have met with such success. We were all but snowed in for a few days. (Rural areas -- they're way out there.)

My only real problem with it was surviving those pauses between "Please put all your electronic devices away" and "it is now 'safe' to use portable electronic devices, never mind that airline employee you're sitting next to who was writing e-mails on his Blackberry during the entire takeoff segment, please just believe us when we say that your 4-year-old iPod is hazardous to our entire operation." That is, regrettably, not a flaw of the device.