my mind on books

I recently started a new full time job after being laid off for eight months. The job offer came along about the time that the Kindle 2 was announced, so I decided to treat myself (….for the commute, of course….). I’ve had the Kindle for a little over a week now, coinciding with my first week of work.

I find reading on the Kindle very comfortable; plus, those times when I don’t get a seat on the BART train, I can easily read with one hand. Also the basic web browsing with 3G wireless seems like a great feature for those times when there isn’t a handy WiFi hotspot. Anyone who’s traveled with a heavy suitcase stuffed with reading material might appreciate being able to load up a lightweight Kindle instead.

Some recent books that have Kindle editions include:
How We Decide
Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

Kindle resources that I’ve found so far (please let me know of others in the comments):

Kindle Boards
Joe Wikert’s Kindleville Blog
The Kindle Reader blog

Thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program I received a copy of The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett, in which the Queen of England has a chance encounter with a bookmobile that sparks her interest in reading. The book focuses on the transformative effects of reading and the rather dismayed response of the palace staff. Towards the middle of the book I was feeling rather sorry for Her Majesty, but a little plot twist at the end put her in quite a different light. This book would make a good “stocking stuffer” for bibliophiles.

Brewster Kahle at Wikipedia

Internet Archive

from ScribeMedia.org

Speaker Bob Stein is Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book

A few years ago A.J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, about his cover-to-cover reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which seemed like a daunting enough task, but now there is Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea (Perigree, 2008), which Nicholson Baker reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times.

Complete Review has additional links for Reading the OED.