to kindle or not to kindle

On a recent flight home from Philadelphia I saw a Kindle for the first time in real life. It was sleek and futuristic looking - and oh so tempting...

The thought of being able to replace rooms full of crammed bookshelves with one device the size of a small notebook was alluring...the notion of being able to have any book that I desired, almost instantly, was mesmerizing.

But then, during a somewhat prolonged taxi and takeoff process (ah, the joys of rush hour on a rainy day at the airport), one of its glaring flaws struck me: even though it doesn't use power to display text, it does require power to turn pages, so unless you are a really slow reader - it would almost definitely qualify as an electronic device that must be turned off during takeoff and landing. Those are the times I most crave something to read...before return flights I'm often scrambling through newsstands to find new reading material (since I finished reading the complimentary airline magazines on my departing flight). All the easily-downloadable content in the world can't save you from the boredom of sitting on a runway for 30 minutes if you can't turn on your kindle.

Undoubtedly, its a true conservationists' dream: no trees killed to bring everyone and endless supply of reading content!...but where reading is concerned, some of my favorite ways to recycle are tearing articles to share with friends or passing along a book for someone else to read (often along with scribbled notes, rhetorical questions, and other wacky Jenisms in the margins).

And as far as I can tell, you can't rent content, i.e., there don't seem to be any discounts for buying and deleting as soon as you're done. If you buy a real-life book you can at least share it, re-sell it or donate it when you are done.

And apparently, there's no color - great for books and the New York Times; not so great for comic books and fashion or decorating magazines.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for me, books and magazines can take a lot of abuse - being rolled up and stuffed into purses and suitcases, having entire bottles of wine or water spilled on them...being tossed, dropped or bumped. As tough as a kindle might be, I don't know that it could stand up to my chronic clutziness.

None-the-less, I caught myself thinking that it might be a nice new toy to have.