I am the first to acknowledge my lack of technical ability. I use only a fraction of the functions on my IPhone and my husband is constantly on the alert for howls of frustration when I am on the computer. I have gotten better and do have a number of technology improvement goals that I am working towards.

With that said, I want to now confess that my reluctance to embrace Kindle was misplaced. “Oh, you’ll both need one,” a friend assured me when I explained that we finally got one as Shades of Murder went onto Kindle. At that point, I had barely turned it on while my husband was happily downloading old Sherlock Holmes and other books. My friend was correct though. Once I became comfortable with the basics, we did order a second Kindle. This does not mean that we love regular books less, or that we will stop buying books. Having a wonderful repository of titles literally at your fingertips though is so much fun. Classics that you haven’t read in years and others that you always meant to read are often downloadable for free and many independent authors price their books at a low cost so you can explore new writers.

As for the “feel of a book” and being able to turn corners down (tsk, tsk if you do), that doesn’t work well with an e-book reader. On the other hand, I have a nice leather holder for mine and my husband opted for a fabric holder (the same fabric as they use with luggage). The holder almost duplicates the “book feel”. Being able to increase the size of the font isn’t something that we’ve used yet, but I can see the day coming for that.

All-in-all having an e-book reader, whether a stand-alone item or an application for your Ipad/smart phone, is a nice gadet to have.