New Amazon Kindles!

I'm not going to bother pretending that Amazon's announcement of a whole line of Kindles today is not super exciting.  There's a $79 Kindle.  Granted it has ads, but still!  There's a Kindle Touch!  And, most knee-quakingly exciting of all, there's the Kindle Fire.  Even the name is exciting.  And it's $199.  I was pretty much resigned to not getting an iPad until the price came down and everyone else already had one (you know, like it was with the iPod).  But $199--that's, like, affordable.  And it uses Cloud computing, which the nerd in me absolutely loves.

But more than that, this is a step in the right direction: toward getting everyone reading on e-book.  Yes, I know, there will always be the paper snobs who go on about the feel of books and the smell of books.  And that's fine.  But the Kindle (or the Nook, or the Sony eReader or whatever) is light and convenient, it's easy to read and it makes books accessible anywhere and everywhere.  What's not to love about that? 

More than that, I was out walking one of my dogs the other day and a neighbor was coming back from the bus stop with her third grade daughter.  "Feel this," my neighbor said, holding up her daughter's book bag.  It was so heavy.  I'm a grown woman and I wouldn't want to carry that bag every day.  I can't imagine allowing my third grader to carry that.  $79 is a step in the direction of children using e-readers instead of text books.  And saving a few third grade backs (not to mention a few million trees) sounds like a really, really good thing.

Inga Gardner
Editor