My Kindle 2 Is Here!

Oh yeah...it came about a week ago. My Kindle 2 is here!

Point 1:

I've been seriously reading for decades....and decades. If I read a book and like it, I usually keep it. If I don't like a book, or think there is little chance that I may want to reread it or refer to it in the future, I give it to someone else or donate it to a charity. Sometimes people borrow my books and do not bring them back. The net result of all of this is that I have accumulated about 1,200 books in my home office library. That's a lot of books! However, I'm told that my Kindle 2 will hold 1,500 books.

Point 2:

I'm well over the halfway point in life, so...I have already lived much longer than I have remaining to live. If you make a few assumptions and do a little math involving my life expectancy and the number of books I have accumulated so far in life, the storage capacity of my new Kindle is a gross overkill. I only need room for about 308 more books. 

Point 3:

That's about all the bad news I have to offer on the Kindle 2. 

• They fixed the "it's easy to accidentally turn a page" problem. 
• They fixed the "you have to highlight complete lines of text or you get fragmented sentences on the front-end or back-end of your highlighted passage" problem. 
• The Kindle 1 was easy to carry around; the Kindle 2 is even easier to carry around. It's very flat and easily fits in the pocket of my small leather portfolio (the kind used to hold a pad of paper). 
• They say the battery life is much longer. 
• It talks to you! I know the speech-to-text feature has generated some controversy. However, so far it is very cool to kick back, sip a glass of wine and listen to what the "Kindlemeister" has to say. 

OK, you can read all about the rest of the new stuff on Amazon if you are interested. Here's something I really like about my Kindle. I am a member of an informal learning group. We often discuss books during our monthly meetings. We rotate facilitation duties and each month a different group member leads the discussion. It's my month and I have been asked to lead a discussion on Malcolm Gladwell's latest book titled Outliers: The Story of Success. I downloaded Outliers to my Kindle and highlighted significant passages as I read the book (it is very easy to electronically highlight text on the Kindle). In some cases, I highlighted fairly large blocks of text. Then, I simply connected the Kindle to my computer (with the USB cable that came in the box) and...zip...the highlighted text popped up on my screen. I edited a few things, added a few of my own notes and clicked the "Print" icon. In a matter of minutes, I created notes for discussing the book at our meeting. It worked perfectly! Think about it. This little feature is quite handy for extracting and remembering the main points of any book.  

Yeah...I still like to read books the old fashion way. And I expect I will keep buying physical copies of certain books for various reasons. But I'm glad I caught this technological wave and I am going to continue riding it for a while to see where it goes. Now I'm no Charlton Heston, I'm not that dramatic and I don't own a rifle, but you will probably have to "pry my Kindle from my cold, dead hands."   

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive. His new book, Being Productive: Learning to Get More Done With Less Effort, is now available through Amazon.