First I Blogged, Then I Kindled...

When I first decided to start blogging I had no idea where I would go with it. I have been blogging now for over 2 and a half years. I've written over 500 blogs and over 100,000 visitors have come to this blog -- many of them just looking for information on one thing or another but that's fine with me. My blog has served my purposes --- it disciplines me to write on a regular basis, it makes me more mindful in my days as I think about what I can blog about next, it has connected me with many, many people I might never meet otherwise, it sells a few books, and it helps me to promote people and things that I believe in. That's enough to make me happy.

Now my new cyber adventure is straying into the world of Kindle. For anyone who doesn't know Kindle is a new gizmo developed by those clever people at Amazon. It is a book-sized, lightweight wireless, digital device that allows owners to connect to a vast library of thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, and other information sources, download them to their Kindle and take them with them wherever they go. The Kindle can store the equivalent of 200 books plus gives you lots of interactivity features. The list price is $399 which is high but that didn't stop the first supply of the gizmo from selling out completely. What will its future be? Who knows but it is worth considering. My bet is Amazon will massage its flaws until no one can live without one.

Now I grew up in a house full of books and cannot imagine life without books. I love them. I love their covers and the typography on the page and the texture of the paper. I am the sort of reader who underlines and makes notes in the margin and turns down pages and abuses the heck out of a book but that just makes them all the more beloved to me. I have on a few rare occasions had to purchase a new copy of a book because the original one was so marked up it was unreadable anymore. So the idea of an electronic gizmo replacing a beloved book is hard to imagine. And yet.... I can certainly understand the appeal of a gadget that would contain a lot of books because I've been known to take 5 books to the beach!

I don't stray very far. I work at home and I love moleing up for days at a time to work on books and knit and design and read and listen to audiobooks while I do those things. But for people who commute, particularly by public transportation, and lead busy lives I can imagine their Kindle could be their new best friend. Plus young people today are used to having a digital gizmo in their hands so a Kindle will be perfect for them. They can listen to music on their MP3 player while yakking on their cell phones, text-messaging on their PDAs and catching up on their reading. I just hope they don't do all that while driving.

So, anyway, I decided, as a writer, to join the Kindle revolution and offer my books in Kindle format. Yesterday I formatted My Last Romance and other passions and uploaded it to the Kindle store and this week I will add The Old Mermaid's Tale. It is a very slick little plan. I provide my books in HTML format ( a language in which I am fluent) and set the price - I decided on half of the hardcopy price. After that Amazon does the rest. We shall see if anyone is interested enough to buy them.

But I love this idea. First of all I love the word "kindle" --- to kindle means to start a fire and if there is anything in this world I would be pleased to be a part of it would be to help start a fire for reading in people! Reading is to me the single greatest power for transformation in this world. If you read and develop a love for books you will have a better life than if you don't. It's that simple.So if Kindle can kindle the flame of reading --- and hopefully a love for literature --- in people then it is a good and wonderful thing and I hope it thrives. Reading is good and, in this busy crazy world, necessary. I hope Kindle ignites the fire of loving literature and that it burns brightly and develops into a roaring conflagration.

Thanks for reading.