Judy Ellis, 67, got her first cell phone two years ago. So it’s fair to say that like many in her generation, the Minneapolis resident has not been an early adopter of new technology. Then Amazon’s Kindle came along.
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“It’s just so easy to use,” she said, “and the adjustable font size makes a big difference in how quickly you can read.”
But don’t typecast this as a one-note phenomenon. For Ellis and many of her peers, larger type size is just one reason they have embraced e-readers, the increasingly popular mobile devices for reading electronic versions of books, newspapers and magazines.
Portability, accessibility, affordability, readability (beyond the font size) and the availability of thousands of titles have made Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader and other e-readers enormously appealing to seniors and baby boomers.
Via LISNews.
One of my co-workers has being weighing her options and finally got an iPad, where she can download books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and read the ones on Google's new e-book service. I still love my Kindle, though. Give me free wireless connexion and the ability to download and read a book nearly anywhere I would go, and I'm happy. But I've noticed no matter what e-book reader people choose, they tend to love it, and it really seems to increase the amount and fun they have reading.
Which, as a librarian, I'm all for. Plus, I see people using the library who have e-book readers as well. As one person put it, there are books I want to read but not buy, and the library is where I get those.
I have 144 books on my Kindle right now, if you don't consider that some of those are actually collections (such as the 15 Wizard of Oz books, the 16 volumes of Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, the collected works of Dickens, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Plato, Aristotle, and Welles, among others). The device (since it is 'only' the second generation) will hold 1500. Maybe some day I'll troll my way through the thousands upon thousands of free books and get that many on there, but I doubt it. The newer ones hold over 3,000 books. 3,000. That's not quite my entire library, but it's probably close. The idea of holding a library in the palm of your hand is just, well, amazing. But the fact that it's easy to navigate, so it truly is at your fingertips is the really positive aspect I love about the Kindle.
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