Nature photographers often end up with a lot of free time on trips, whether it’s on airplanes or when the weather’s bad. While there’s often work to be done editing images or writing, sometimes you just can’t work anymore and want a break. Personally, I like to read in my down time. Yet between the weight of my camera bag and the weight of my computer bag, I never wanted to take more than one book with me on a trip and would often end up reading very slowly or re-reading my book. After my trip to Africa, I’ve definitely come to love my Kindle!

I’d played with a Kindle 1 a while ago, and while I liked the e-ink screen, I hated that when I picked the Kindle up, I always pressed the Next Page button. I refused to buy one. On the Kindle 2, the buttons are a lot stiffer, preventing accidental activation most of the time. Plus the Kindle 2 is a lot thinner and a bit lighter, making it even more pleasant than a book or Kindle 1 to carry. While I’m still not 100% thrilled with the Kindle’s design (I think the screen should be larger and closer to the size of a real page, replacing the keyboard with a touch screen), it’s quite usable.

On this trip, I spent over 45 hours on airplanes and another 15 or so in airports. Plus, a number of our shark excursions were cancelled due to big storms, and there wasn’t much to do in the distant areas we were staying. So, I ended up reading 5 different books on the trip (side note: I highly recommend Pillars of Earth and The Devil in the White City), and they weighed less than what one thick paperback weighs. Since I keep my Kindle’s wireless connection off, the battery lasted just fine for all this reading over two weeks, and the e-ink screen made it so that I didn’t feel any eye strain.

When you first use a Kindle, the brief flash of the screen as you turn a page is weird (it’s much faster than on the Kindle 1) , but you quickly get used to it. Plus features like the built-in dictionary make me perfectly willing to accept the tradeoff of the screen flash.

While most Kindle books on Amazon are a couple of bucks cheaper than their new paper counterparts, I think it’ll take a while for those savings to make up for the cost of buying the Kindle (especially if you normally get your books from a library or buy them used). However, the ability to have so many books with me with no weight penalty has made the Kindle completely worth the cost.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 7:29pm and is filed under Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.