I learned a new, important aspect of owning an e-reader: Don’t sit on it!

I was faced with a Kindle “come to Jesus” moment only four days ago: I took my Kindle to the pool to finish up John Scalzi’s “Old Mans War” while the kiddos splashed in the (very nice) public pool. I left my deck chair to acquire a fizzy beverage and made the deliberate decision to leave the kindle there, but tucked under a towel for “security”. Upon my return, and after a run-in with a parent of a friend of my daughter’s, I plopped into back into my deck chair…and felt something lumpy under the towels – which were under my butt.

You can imagine my horror. There were no cracks on the cover, but the screen had clearly bent along the upper right corner. None of the pixels in a gentle, butt-shaped, swoop along the upper right-hand corner of the screen have worked since that ill-fated moment. I continued reading that afternoon, but the 2nd half of the first three lines of every page were obscured. I quickly came to the sad, frustrating conclusion that I had killed my kindle. Partially. Enough to make reading a book annoying at best, impossible at worst.

So. I reached that moment where I was faced with a decision: My kindle was broken. I could A) make do and simply put up with the damage. B) Give up on the kindle completely ad experiment with another device, aka the iPad and read my kindle books on the free aps or c) repair my kindle.

I lasted about a day. Today, a brand new (or refurb?) Kindle is charged and loaded with my files looking, feeling, and reading exactly like the broken one did four days ago and I’m out $90. The logic went something like: $90 to get a replacement overnight or spend $499 experimenting with an iPad. Amazon customer support was decent – email response within 24 hours. Phone support within 30 seconds when I made the decision to escalate to a call. Free, overnight shipping when I made the call to “repair” my broken device. I send the broken one back within 30 days, and get to have the “fixed” one immediately.

What I discovered during the 48 hours I wrestled with what to do, was that I use my kindle all the time. I read every day. As mentioned before, I tend to read a lot of things (on my kindle) over and over. As much as I hated spending the money on a stupid mistake (next time, kindle, you take your chances with the public) I couldn’t live without it. In an “I’m pretty spoiled, aren’t I?” sort of way.

I’m still very iPad curious, but the haste with which I replaced my kindle proved something: I’m not curious enough to fork out an extra $399 to read the same things I can already read on the kindle. I’ll have a pad at some point, but I’ll have my kindle, too. And the device that replaces it, will get just as many blog posts, I promise!