I love books.  While I’ve described myself as a reader, but not an avid reader, I do admit that I simply love books.  I have shelves packed full and stacks on dressers that are waiting to be read.  I love to go into bookstores and soak up the titles.  When I buy a book, it’s the coolest thing in the world, even if I don’t get around to reading it for…um, ever.  So when I was thinking about getting the Kindle, I really wondered if I’d get that giddy ‘gotta have that book’ feeling when I was browsing Amazon or the Kindle store from the device.  I truly didn’t know if my love was linked to the “having” of the physical thing I could hold and carry home, or if there was some other fascination that would carry into the Kindle Experience.

After several months now of reading and buying books on and through the Kindle, I can say with absolute certainty (for me) that shopping for ebooks is just as cool and heady and inspiring as walking into a bookstore.  For me, a book is about potential.  What I adore is all that information just sitting there waiting for me to soak it up.  Sometimes, just knowing I have a book with an answer in it is enough, even if I don’t read the thing from cover to cover.  I know it’s there, I know I can draw upon the knowledge when I need it.  I know I can enter the story-world when I want to.

In some ways, having the store available anytime, anywhere through the device is temptation bordering on torture!  I’ve taken to putting books I just really can’t afford to invest in (financially or timewise) into my wish list so I can keep a little of that potential within my grasp should I need it.  It is very easy to make an impulse buy in a weak moment.  I almost wish the thing didn’t have quite so much memory so that I could have the excuse of storage space to rein things in.  As it is, I’m doing OK by allowing myself to get a new book only when I’ve finished another one.  Sort of.  Not really.

There may be those who truly associate reading with the physical, tactile experience of touch and smell and sight.  But reading e-books doesn’t have to mean that you will give up being a book lover.  A book is so much more than paper or e-ink.  A book is an experience, an idea, and an escape all at once.  It might adapt to a new venue, but it does not lose its potential.

In other, much more mundane Kindle experience news, some daringness has been achieved with my beloved toy and I acutally read in the bathtub for the first time a couple of weeks ago.  It was a major step.  While I have never actually dropped a paper book in the tub, there have been enough damp pages and close calls that I was wary of getting the Kindle close to the water.  And even having managed it, I was nervous enough as I was reading that some of the bubbly relaxation was negated.  A friend who is Kindle-hostle declared that bathtub reading was absolutely imperative for acceptance, so I got curious and looked up accessories that might make water reading more palatable.  Sure enough, there are a few water-proof case/covers to choose from!  Problem solved.

Even more daring has been my Kindle’s trip to the pool this week.  Last week, I took a hardcover book to wade through while my children were wading in the kiddie pool and sat too close to the sand box.  Some enthusiastic digger managed to fling an entire shovel full of sand over my shoulder and onto the book (and neck and hair and lap, etc.)  So now, I’m careful to pick where I sit when reading.  And I certainly worry more about leaving my bag by the chairs, etc. when I have the Kindle with me.   In both these cases, cost of the device is the barrier to my being comfortable with it in the same settings I am quite comfortable taking a book.  Hopefully someday, that will change, too.