Eight years ago, when I was leaving a school, my closest friends there bought me a Kindle. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the company behind that device, nor am I a huge fan of ebooks. However, I find it incredibly useful in two ways: I use
Instapaper a lot, saving many longer articles for later reading, and I use Netgalley and Edelweiss to read eARCs. It is easier to carry it around than a book, allowing me to always have reading material when waiting at the doctors, or at the post office, or where ever a long line or wait might occur.
Over the summer, my old one died and I had to purchase a new. The new one has features I don't particularly like, including removal of the side panels that made it easy to "flip" pages (it could be held in either hand, allowing for either thumb to do the work; the new one makes you touch the screen, sometimes missing and going back instead of forward, or making it difficult to go more than one or two pages back), or having the controls for font size be so sensitive that a slight brush of the finger in the wrong place can make have you go from this to
this.
Ugh.
While setting mine up, since I don't share my notes or highlights with others nor do I shop for books online, I turned off ads. Then I found this in my email:
How venial is Bezos? I have to pay to remove ads and offers from my device? Because I don't want to continually get junk mail from his company, I have to pay??
I know this isn't enough to convince people not to shop there. But it is proof that this is an evil company not above extorting money so that you can be left alone.
