Throwback: My Original Amazon Kindle Review from 2007 (Premium)

I'm reevaluating the devices I use for reading and will write about that soon. Meanwhile, here's my original Amazon Kindle review from 2007.

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I knew Amazon was on to something with its new e-book reader, the Kindle, when my wife was immediately curious about the device. Stephanie is many things, but when it comes to technology, she simply couldn't care less. More important, perhaps, the price of the Kindle--a whopping $400 in its initial incarnation--didn't faze her much at all. And she's notoriously thrifty. She was thumbing around the device within minutes of its arrival and has already begun planning how she would use it while working out and on occasional commutes into Boston. Her first question: "Does it support multiple accounts, so I can have my own content?" (Answer: No, unfortunately. We'll have to share.)

My kids, who are largely immune by now to most of the technology that comes into this house, should have been completely ambivalent about the Kindle as well, but weren't. My daughter, who literally just turned 6 and can only read a bit, was instantly interested when she spied the device in my hands, and after discovering what it was--a little computer book, as she described it--her first reaction was an incredibly positive "cool!" This is high praise, indeed, from the kindergarten crowd.

My oldest, Mark, was even more impressed. A nine-year-old, he immediately had to play with the device and grokked its admittedly utilitarian user interface almost intuitively. But when he discovered that you could buy books wirelessly and get them almost instantaneously, he just had to try it. And then next thing I know, he was taking the Kindle off with him on a car ride with mom so he could read the one "Encyclopedia Brown" book that's currently available on Amazon's newest online service.

As for me, I'm perhaps even more excited about the Kindle than is the rest of my family. A voracious reader since I learned how--as I kid I used to fall back to the sides of cereal boxes when I finished that day's "Boston Globe" over breakfast-- I can't get enough of this thing. I regularly read books of all kinds--fiction, non-fiction, history, travel, whatever--and my wife and I subscribe to an embarrassing number of print magazines. Heck, I still read two newspapers every day--the aforementioned Globe (yes, still) and "The New York Times." And I subscribe to the online version of "The Wall Street Journal" just in case that isn't enough. Add all that onto the audiobooks and podcasts I enjoy regularly and the various websites I peruse daily, and there's a lot of reading occurring here.

But I was excited about the Kindle the moment I heard about the first rumors. And when details of the device were revealed just before it went on sale, I knew I had to have one. After coming so close to pulling the trigger on a similar purchase with Sony's e-book reader last year, the Kindle was enough of an improvement that I just had to do it. The questi...