The Many Benefits Of The Amazon Kindle

The Amazon Kindle e-book reader is, for me at least, very close to the perfect product. As someone who reads a lot of books I must certainly be pretty close to the Amazon marketing team’s target demographic. Generally I would expect to read a minimum of one book every week. I will often have one novel, one work of non-fiction and a number of reference books in various stages of completion at any one time.

I doubt if that’s atypical – or else conventional paper books wouldn’t sell as well as they do. It does mean that I spend a hefty amount of money on books though. As well as the cost incurred, my book collection can quickly expand and wind up occupying a fair bit of physical space. Once in a while I take the time to sort through my collection and, putting reference books and any particular favourites aside, have a good clean out. Generally the books wind up with family, friends or charity shops – so at least someone gets the benefit of them.

Fairly recently, before a house move, I got rid of around fifty books. When I saw them collected together, packed and ready to go, I realised that I had spent something between $500 and $1000 on books in less than a year.

The Amazon Kindle is a fairly high ticket item itself of course, but the downloadable e-books on the Kindle webiste are generally a fair bit less expensive that the conventional printed equivalent. That’s only to be expected. After all, there are no printing or distribution costs and Amazon doesn’t incur any postal charges. Even a saving of just a few dollars per book – which seems perfectly achievable – would mean that anyone who reads on a regular basis could pretty quickly offset the price of the device and then start to actually save money.

The potential benefits aren’t just financial. The Kindle 2 has a storage capacity for around 1500 e-books whereas the Kindle DX, which will start shipping on June 10 2009, can store 3500. That’s a lot of books – and a lot of physical storage space that will no longer be taken up in your home or office.

Some users have suggested that the Kindle is a green, eco-friendly, device – based upon the fact that it will save on the usage of paper. Whilst you can see the logic in this argument, clearly some consideration must be given to the materials used in production and the manner of disposal when it reaches the end of its useful life.

The benefits achieved will vary from one user to another and will probably be strongly dependent upon the number of books bought each year. However, it does look as if the Kindle offers keen readers plenty of advantages which should be more than sufficient to justify the purchase price of the device.

Discover the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and learn how to save money by getting free Kindle books.