I know that many of you readers already know about e-books, because sometime between the early days, when the e-book landed on the digital landscape (Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, and Barnes and Noble followed with the Nook in 2009) and the present, you ran out and bought one; while we procrastinators held back. So this commentary is not for you pioneers. It is simply to enlighten my uninformed Johnny-and-Jill-come-lately cohorts, who have not yet submerged themselves in the digital pool.
In simple layperson’s terms, the Kindle Fire is an e-book reader, an electronic version of a printed book. Now, I will tell you why I am tickled pink — err, make that tan — about it.
As my son predicted, KF solved my book storage problem. But unfortunately, it did not cure my addiction, because now I buy and read more books, e-books that is, and at a faster pace than before. I recently saw a promo ad that said the KF will hold 6000 books. Hold up, wait a minute, I’d have to be a reading fool to download that many books, unless I have a joint bank account with Jeff Bezos. (Founder and CEO of Amazon.com.)
My Kindle Fire has many features that I enjoy. Aside from the nice crisp colors on the touchscreen, there is a nifty text-to-speech function. While the reader’s voice is not distractingly robotic it is not precisely Audible book quality either. There are some occasional, figurative hiccups, as when the elocution is interrupted by the inability of the automated reader to decipher certain words. Recently, I was listening to a book, while simultaneously reading along, and the reader read St. Louis as Street Louis. Resume — as in a job application — was pronounced resume, like let’s resume reading this story. And there were occasional inadvertent pauses and restarts, like the abbreviation for Doctor of Philosophy. PhD was read as ph — pause, as if the “h” ended the sentence. D was then read as if it were the first word of the following sentence. But such tiny glitches I could overlook.
The audio-text feature advances each page automatically; however, when the audio is muted – my preference – I must touch the screen to turn the page. An adjustable backlight makes reading easier, and it is an excellent feature when reading in a darkened room if you don’t want to disturb your spouse.
