This is my … fourth? e-book reader. All the previous ones (there was a beautiful Sony, a nice Nook, and another Kindle) have died premature deaths, well with the exception of the Nook, which still lives, but it is not an e-ink screen so it always felt more like a tablet. This new little fellow is the Kindle Voyage. Early birthday present. It’s an amazing device that makes me never want to stop reading (as if any of us ever want to stop reading anyway! Ridiculous!).
Of course, it turned out that all the covers I had from the long dead predecessors were of different sizes and not really suitable for the new kid on the block. Besides, none of them were wristlet-friendly. My thing is now that I want to take the little one outside with me every time I go out with the baby, and I need to always be ready to throw the reader in its case and have my hands free to grab the child and save him from at least one third of the injuries happening to him throughout the usual day.
Right. So I made this cover for it from a piece of leather I had. It works out pretty well. A bit too tight though, so it takes me several seconds to put the Kindle in, which kind of defeats the purpose of allowing me to jump to the child’s rescue without delay every five minutes. But I’m hoping it will stretch a bit with use and turn out to be perfect. We’ll wait and see. I bet though that the cover will again outlive the device and join its sisters in the box of beautiful unused covers. I’ll have to find uses for all of those. I actually know I will.
Until then, good reading times are waiting!
Ack! I was just this morning wondering why you hadn’t posted in such a long time when in fact you had posted but my settings just got screwed up and I ignore my reader so I didn’t see your blog updates!
Also just this morning I was thinking that maybe I should make another attempt to embrace my e-reader (a Kindle so old it has buttons on it). I thought this class I’m taking would do it. So many of our readings are available in pdf, and I was excited to send them to my Kindle and then head to softball/ballet/doctor’s offices so I can get my reading done on the fly without packing a giant bag. Alas, these pdfs are either way too tiny to read or they can’t be highlighted or the pages get all out of order between my computer and the Kindle. So I bought myself a new giant bag to carry big old books in it everywhere I go. So much for streamlining.
I really do like the idea of e-readers, I just haven’t been able to get into them in practice. Eventually I’ll have to, I know. The writing is on the wall. (The e-ink writing on the virtual wall, of course.)
I do like your Kindle bag, though. I thought of your craftiness recently, too, but I think it was yesterday afternoon not this morning.
Oh, too bad that you couldn’t make those PDFs work. The truth is that PDFs are not ideal for reading on e-readers. I dislike PDFs in general, for screen reading purposes (they should be reserved for documents that need printing), because they are not very flexible. Make sure you try a landscape orientation for reading the PDFs, because that way sometimes the screen manages to fit the size of the page better.
I do carry my coursework books places with me too. If I think about it, I enjoy having those books on paper, because I find it easier to browse the text when I’m looking for some quick info, and also I think the paper format helps my visual memory work better when I study.
And I’m glad you like my Kindle cover. I’m quite fond of it. It’s been used quite a lot lately and it works very nicely.
As for buttons, I wish my Kindle still had buttons, to be honest. I mean, OK, I’m renouncing books, and switching heart and soul to the e-book, but at least allow me some buttons because the full touch screen thing… I’m not a huge fan of that. But, well, I’ll take what I get. Apparently, many people miss the buttons, and this version of Kindle does have something that tries to imitate the feel of a button, unlike the previous buttonless model.
I love the case you made! I wish I shared your enthusiasm for the Kindle, though – I can’t bring myself to use mine. It just interrupts my reading in a way that turning a paper page never does.
Did you take to your reading device right away or did you have teething problems and take a while to get into using it regularly?
You know, I don’t think I got it from the very beginning. I didn’t understand the need for a dedicated device just for reading, for example. But I got it very soon after starting to use one: it took such little space in my bag and it held so many books! And it has dictionaries in there! And I could hold it with two fingers! I don’t know. Just last night I was telling Adi that I never want to read a paper book again. I know, it’s exaggerated, but, yeah, I’m a big fan of e-readers.