My wife bought me a Kindle for our wedding anniversary. I was going to wait to buy an ereader until general purpose tablets got good enough/cheap enough, but it’s quickly turned into a vital posession that accompanies me everywhere. Even if I still have huge reservations about Amazon’s DRM, it’s ideal for catching up on classics and picking up cheap editions of books I’ve not yet read. And I could actually see myself carrying it around as well as a tablet like the Galaxy Tab eventually.
I am noticing a peculliar trait emerging, though. I’m suddenly reluctant to buy new books. Maybe it’s because I want value for money from the Kindle, or maybe it’s because our flat is already full of enough dead trees to start a library. I really want to read the new book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams – Macrowikinomics – but can’t bring myself to buy the paper edition.
A shame, as the original Wikinomics is a classic, and still the best description of the new collaborative economy which describes freelance work in all industries there is.