You know that old saying, “The one with the most toys in the end wins.”  Well, I may not be a winner but I’m certainly a front runner.

My latest toy is the Amazon Kindle DX, which I pre-ordered, and it came just before I was making a trip to St.  John in the US Virgin Islands.  The product is so user friendly that within minutes I was able to use it to download books, sign up for a subscription to the New York Times and check out my website.

I would recommend the makers of this new device flood airports with salespersons and have them go to crowded waiting rooms take out their Kindle, use it and wait for customers to beat a path to their seat to find out what this new fangled thing is they are using.

I couldn’t take out my Kindle from my brief case, turn it on with out people inquiring what I had.  This occurred in airline club rooms and at the gate while waiting to board a plane.

One couple who was on their way to Belize, interrupted my reading, to ask what I had and I explained that it was the new Kindle and then had to show them how it worked.  To say they were in awe is an understatement. They then told me they had a separate bag of about 15 books they were taking with them on vacation.  They then asked me how many books my Kindle would hold.  I said 3,500.

“We’ve got to get one,” was the next comment.

Now If this incident happened once, I wouldn’t be very impressed.  But it happened every time I took it out of my briefcase and the inquiring people didn’t seem to flinch at the price.

Despite the wide publicity Kindle received on the Oprah Show, these people didn’t know anything about the product, and I believe they would have placed an order on the spot, despite what might be considered by some a pricey item at $487.

Now I have been labeled an early adopter by many, but my wife is on the opposite end of the spectrum, but an avid reader.  I now have to share my Kindle with her.

My New York Times is delivered to me every morning before 7AM, books are downloaded in less than 1 minute and if I don’t want to read the words, a voice will do it for me.

Websites are available to scan, periodicals are available to subscribe to and some 300,000 books are available to purchase at half the retail price or less.  The first chapter of a books is available for a free preview. You can take notes, highlight paragraphs and save and bookmark your pages.  The charging chord is not bulky and the same chord is used, when detaching the AC plug, to interchange data with your computer, plugging into a USB port.

Fonts are available in a variety of sizes and you can read your tabular page vertically or horizontally.

I can’t understate the Kindle’s simplicity and ease of travel enough, even the elderly will find it easier to operate than opening a prescription pill bottle.

With the dire straits that newspapers are in as well as magazines, it seems to me that tabular readers are the wave of the future.