Analysis: Is the Kindle 2 going to be worth it for me?

All right.

I am now lusting after a Kindle 2, or a Sony E-Reader because it would be such a relief to be able to get rid of the books I have weighing on my shelves (that I cannot bear to part with), and to be able to carry all of them with me when I travel or just in general.

Everyone says you can’t compare to holding a book and reading it, and I generally agree.. but with really heavy hard cover books, I am never comfortable reading them.

I can’t hold them up, I can’t always lie on my belly comfortably to read them.. it’s annoying, and having a Kindle 2 that is light would be really cool.

Don’t get it twisted: It will never, EVER be as cheap as buying books second hand.

So I am not under any delusion that it’ll save me money, and I have kept this in mind, along with the following:

1. Finding a good bookstore that sells second hand books that are of current titles, is a challenge.

2. I am not really a fan of second-hand books only because .. you just never know where the book has been, if y0u know what I mean.

3. The library has second-hand books for free. I could just wait for them to catch up with the times and save money on second-hand books altogether, I just can’t keep ’em.

I am frugal, but I really love books. I guess I’d have to read about 100 a year to make them worthwhile. And I love books so much, I end up gathering a huge collection of them without even knowing how that happened.

Anyway, convenience for travelling, getting rid of clutter and the coolness factor makes me curious to try out these devices or at least figure out the cost.

Let’s begin.

I am only going to focus on the Kindle 2 offered by Amazon, but you should be aware of the fact that there are a lot of E-Readers out there not just the ones from Amazon.

Kindle 2 costs $359 USD

Space: 1.4GB (1500 books!)

Weight: 10.2 ounces

Battery life: 4 days with wireless on, 2 weeks without wireless

Formats supported:

• Kindle (AZW)
• TXT
• Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX))
• MP3
• unprotected MOBI
• PRC natively
• PDF
• HTML
• DOC
• JPEG
• GIF
• PNG
• BMP through conversion

Display: 6″ diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale.

Other Features:

• USB Charger and Wall Charger allowed
• 20% faster page turns
• Adjustable text size
• No sun glare
• Paper-like E-Ink screen
• Bookmarks
• MP3, Podcasts & Audio books
• PDF Document conversion
• Hold personal documents ($0.10 per emailed doc)
• Book will read to you (no, for real, like an audiobook but for anything)
• Built-in Dictionary
• Wikipedia access – no wireless bill!
• Basic web browser – no wireless bill!

These are the books I’d immediately want to buy for my library and their prices:

One bad thing is that they are still missing a LOT of my favourite books, but maybe this’ll be the new thing so that I don’t have to keep carrying heavy biographies to read just because I am in the mood for some Warren Buffet.

Wow. That’s quite a lot of dough to splash on books, but honestly, if I could really use it all the time and carrying the books with me electronically and save on space and weight..

I AM ALL FOR IT!

But for now, since I am in Canada, I can’t really look at e-books as a decent way to replace my library because we don’t get all the cool things you Americans do like free wireless, or easy access for everything.

When I move to the States, I am going to seriously consider buying one of these just to lighten the load.