How do I Kindle? Let me count the ways!

Don't forget to enter this week's giveaway.

Also 100 Books Every Writer Should Read now has a .jpg ------->>>>>>>
YAY! Clearly self-made. What? This is why I'm a writer, and not an illustrator.

I've promised myself to do a post on the awesome that is my Kindle. I love my Kindle to peeeecies! His name is RB (after a character in my first novel and the two awesome real-life people that character's based on) and I'm tempted to marry it. I mean, they let a guy here marry a video game character last year, they'd probably let me marry RB...

5. Travel

It's so easy to travel with RB. He's a Kindle DX, which is like B5 size, almost like your regular printer paper. It's heavier and bigger than most electronic readers. But it's still lighter and less bulky than 3 or 4 books, which is what I normally travel with.

4. Free books
If the copyright for a book is out, then it's available for anywhere between free and $2.00 from Amazon or Project Gutenberg. That's how I ended up reading The Secret Garden and What Katy Did. I also got A Christmas Carol and Wind in the Willows for free. And I've just added The Scarlet Letter.

3. Japan

As you know, I live in Japan. I don't read enough kanji for Japanese books to be anything but study material. The bookstores here have tiny English sections. And the nearest of the big chains is an hour away by train. It all adds up to my pretty much HAVING TO buy all my books online.

Even since I discovered the free-shipping site, Book Depository, I still face a couple of issues. Firstly, Book Depository doesn't always have the books I want. It's rare, but when it happens, I order from Amazon and have to pay almost twice as much when you factor in shipping. Secondly, I am not a permanent fixture in Japan. This program has a 5 year max. Eventually, I'm going to have to take all my crap home. Every time I buy something, I must keep in mind that I will either have to pay to ship it home or throw it out in the next year or two.

2. Emergency Internet

I've mentioned this before. After the earthquake, all the infrastructure was down in the 2 epicentre prefectures. I couldn't use the phone, there was no power. Heck, I only got my home internet back 2 weeks later. If it weren't for the Kindle, friends and family would probably have worried themselves into a few more gray hairs.

Even in smaller emergencies, RB comes through. When I was home for my secondary school reunion in December, I misplaced a poem I was supposed to perform, and I was able to pull it up on Kindle.

I will concede that Kindle internet is some of the slowest, molasses-running-uphill internet in the world, but it comes through in a pinch.

1. Revisions

I don't hear this mentioned a lot among writers, but it's a big perk for me. I can't seem to re-read my entire novel on the computer. Most of us don't read entire novels on backlit LCD screens. And printing 250 pages is giving a tree somewhere a heart attack.

These days I simply save my novel as a .doc file, and email it to RB. And I can re-read the whole thing just as easy as anything else.

The other intrinsic perk of this is that my novel is now sharing a space alongside books by Beth Revis, Stephanie Perkins, Kiersten White, and Louise Rennison. Kindle makes it feel like I've written an actual book.

So, it's still Monday (Finally, I'm finishing a Monday post on a Monday- except it's Tuesday in Japan, but whatever) and that's what's on my mind.

Do you use an e-reader? What do you like about it?

Also stop by Amazon and check out the Cloud Drive. 5 gigs of FREE online storage- sounds like a great way to back up completed MSs.