Kindle me this, Kindle me that… after three years of drooling over the Amazon Kindle, I finally treated myself to one after a great review (and raise) in October. If you can’t treat yourself, who can you treat?! That’s the saying, right…

For all you “I love the smell and feel of a real book” skeptics, I am THE number one book lover, or at least close. I own well over 200 books, and I even infamously color coordinate them on a book shelf that takes up an entire wall in my apartment. For me, the Kindle combines my two ultimate loves – gadgets + reading, and I’m absolutely in love. I’ll tell you why I’ve converted from a paper book reader to an electronic book reader…here are 10 reasons why the Amazon Kindle is my new boyfriend:

1. The Kindle is incredibly thin, small and light, and even with the leather cover, smaller than 90% of the books I’ve carried around in my bag. It makes travel and bus reading super easy – I always have a book with me.
2. Speaking of travel, I’m the girl who lugs around four paperbacks in my suitcase on vacation, there and back. Now, it’s all on the Kindle – when I finish one book on the plane, I can click and have another book at my fingertips.
3. Since the Kindle runs on Amazon’s store, it has all my purchase history and recommendations because I’ve been an Amazon.com user for years. The store is easily browse-able on the Kindle – I’m addicted to reading through reviews and watching bestseller lists, top sales, etc. to find the best books at the moment to read.
4. You can download a “sample” of every book – a first few chapters to read before you actually buy the whole book. How many times have you bought a book for $15 or so, read a couple chapters, and it just wasn’t doing it for you, so you wasted the money, and another book slot on your shelf for something you didn’t even like?
5. Most of the Kindle book prices are at least $5 cheaper than regular book prices. Because of this, combined with the download sample feature, I’m expecting to save some pennies on book purchases.
6. The screen is awesome! I don’t know how they do it, but it looks exactly like a book page. There’s no backlighting, so it’s better for your eyes and doesn’t strain them. (Don’t let someone convince you to get an iPad over a Kindle – the iPad’s screen is bad for your eyes to read on. Not that I’m anti iPad, it’s just not a great eReader).
7. I read more! Because it’s easy to have everywhere, and the ease of the buttons and screen, I’ve been blowing through books.
8. When I fall asleep reading, I don’t have to flip through the book and try to remember where I was the next morning – the Kindle screen stays where it was at!
9. It downloads book in 30 seconds or less, and syncs across all locations (with your PC, iPhone, etc). If I do forget my Kindle, I have a Kindle Reader app on my iPhone, which remembers my location and syncs to where I was at on my Kindle.
10. It has nifty extra features like the ability to read popular book highlights (which I actually really like), highlight and bookmark on your own, email PDFs and documents to read on the Kindle (I’m finally catching up on all those studies and documents I download off the Internet for work, but never get around to printing and reading – stuff like “The State of the Internet Report 2011,” and other geeky stuff.

If you’ve been contemplating the purchase, do it! You won’t regret it, I promise. Let me know what you think about your Kindle, if you have one, or if you have any other questions about owning one!

Currently Feeling: Really pumped about our 90-day road map at work after a two-day planning workshop. We have some exciting features planned!
Currently Anticipating: Friday night happy hour with some of my favorite girls – at a new HH spot with $1 sushi!
Currently Loving: This champagne turkey recipe I’m going to try this weekend for a girls Thanksgiving party I’m hosting. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Tags: 10 Reasons to Buy a Kindle, Amazon Kindle review, book nerd, books, eReaders, reading

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