Interesting, very interesting.

It was my birthday yesterday, and my big pressie from my husband was a Kindle. I was pretty excited to receive it, and did jump up and down a little bit.

I admit that I actually will have to read the rather lengthy instructions that come with it, as some of it isn't particularly intuitive, but meh, that's okay. I did however use it's web browsing capabilities with our wi-fi to go to Project Gutenberg and download a bunch of classics so I've at least got something to read on it, before I go buying stuff from Amazon.

When my husband gave it to me yesterday, he jokingly said to me that 'I can now hold my head up high amongst the other librarians'. This is because I've been moaning about my lack of smart phone primarily (which I now have - an Android phone) and how all the cool librarians have got an iPhone. But it did get me thinking about diverse topics.

1. The Kindle is awesome, the display is fantastically clear and crisp. I've been told that publishers are very unwilling to make text books into e-books, which I see as a really shortsighted strategy. E-book readers are becoming quite reasonably priced now, and I (probably naively) see it as good economic and ecological sense to sell text books more cheaply as e-books. Could rant a lot more on this, but I won't.

2. When I showed it to my Mum, (and brought it into work) she (and other colleagues) had not heard of an e-book reader before. Coincidentally, one of my RSS'ed bloggers wrote an entry in response to a study on technological uptake in Boomers, Gen X & Gen Y. Looking through it, there are only two things on the survey results I don't do, and that is all to do with our crummy Internet connection *grumble grumble living in the country grumble*

So go and have a look at that blog entry and its accompanying graphic to see what you're doing versus what everyone else is doing.