I stepped into the future this morn­ing. I opened up my pack­age from Amazon.com, and found my birth­day present to myself, my new Kin­dle. For a long time, I poo-poo’d the whole idea of the Kin­dle. Books should be printed on paper and bound with glue and have pretty and col­or­ful and attrac­tive cov­ers to look at. And peo­ple should have copi­ous book­shelves on which to hold these books.

At the same time, I was secretly intrigued by the tech­nol­ogy and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the Kin­dle. Remem­ber when I went to Palm Springs all those years ago? I used to lug three or more paper­backs with me, some of which were parts of series, and after fin­ish­ing them, I would often drag myself out of my pool-side chair to drive to the Barnes & Noble in Palm Desert only to find that they didn’t have what I wanted. And I would be kinda pissed off. Well, those days are over with the Kin­dle. Seri­ously. This is not an adver­tise­ment. I’m not being paid for this. I love the Kin­dle. Now that I have one for myself and have seen how it works, I won­der why I waited so long.

When V and I moved into our cur­rent abode, we made a sac­ri­fice with space. There is no room here for book­shelves and a library. When I cleared out my stor­age, I “donated” dozens of paper­backs that I didn’t really want to get rid of, but in all real­ity, couldn’t keep any­where. Granted, I’ll have to repur­chase those books that I would like to read again, but I won’t ever have to move stuff around to find a spot to put them any­more — and feel guilty about doing so. They’re all stored on the device, and even if I remove them from the device, they’re stored at Amazon’s site and can be down­loaded again at a moment’s notice. I’m totally in love.

That said, I really do hope it hooks me up again. I loved to read and dis­tract myself from real­ity for a while. But with com­put­ers and the inter­net and YouTube and every­thing else vying for my atten­tion — and fuck­ing WoW, Jesus on the cross, Ennis is drag­ging his butt to get to 80, hon­estly — I won­der how effec­tive it will be. I hope so. And I hope that more col­lege classes allow Kin­dle ver­sions of their text­books to be used. OMG. Can you imag­ine? I’ve already seen a few listed, and it’s bound to happen.

This is the way of the future. I can’t wait.