Plans for Kindle-ing

This is a guy who has a lot of free time on his hands: Me. I spend more than 2 hours a day in the Swiss public transportation system, and end up reading a lot, if I am not staring out the window or trying not to be obvious about gawking at the pretty Swiss ladies.

In response to all this reading, my German reading skills have improved remarkably on this two year mission. I suppose this is not an unexpected side effect of reading a daily free newspaper that has trashy content and lots of pictures. The trashy content keeps the subject matter simple, (example); the pictures keep it entertaining, and help me along when there is vocabulary I don't know.

I also read magazines. The three you might catch me with are the Scientific American, Soaring, and the Aero.ch. Scientific American I really enjoy, except occasionally the articles about microbiology that are way over my head. I have a much easier time reading articles about astronomy, technology, psychology, public policy or chemsitry. The Soaring magazine articles are a perk of the membership in the Soaring Society of America, which I must maintain in order to remain a member of my flying club: Skyline Soaring Club. The third magazine is a similar deal: I must maintain a membership in the Aeroclub der Schweiz, as I am an active member in the Bern Flying Club (Segelfluggruppe Bern)

Other occasional reading I might do are some non-fiction books that enhance my focus on some of my more nerdy intellectual interests, such as the recent book I have been reading from Neil Shubin, called Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

The main problem I have is that these things weigh me down. Literally. The backpack is a tedious thing to carry around; weighed even more by the library I carry on my back. If only there was some sort of technology that would allow me to have all these books, without the extra weight.

Another item to consider is that books in English are terribly expensive. I could buy the equivalent books in German, and read those, but the reading is much less relaxed, and a very strenuous exercise. Consider the German-language book that I bought about a year ago, and still haven't had the will to read it (they use really big words! :) )

In order to get books here in Switzerland, I would have to go to the Stauffacher , conveniently located in downtown Bern, or to the Thalia, even more conveniently located in the train station. But buying books at these stores in English are terribly expensive. To give you some sort of an idea about the prices involved:

Amazon (US): 13.95 USD
Stauffacher: 31.50 CHF (27.11 USD on 25 Feb 2009)
Thalia: 31.50 CHF (27.11 USD on 25 Feb 2009)

On a recent trip to Stauffacher, I bought Stacy the whole series of books from Stephanie Meyer, that cost over a hundred francs. Maybe the ability to buy cheaper books over the Internet, without the need to support a brick and morter

Recently, I have been wondering about electronic books, in general; the Amazon Kindle specifically. I often find myself wanting to read something that is not in my backpack, on my long, daily, boring train trip. The convenience of having my whole library with me would be really handy.

Enter the Amazon Kindle, (and the reason for the title of this article). Many years ago, when I was riding the Metro to downtown DC, to work on a contract at the GSA, I read a few classic books on my Palm Pilot Professional PDA. The acquisition of books was kind of a hassle, and the reason they were classic books and not modern books is because the classic ones such as Candide, were expired from copyright. The screen was pretty small, and didn't view very well in many situations, but I did enjoy reading e-books in such a compact package.

With the Kindle, I can purchase the latest books from Amazon, and read them in a convenient-for-Piet format on this small device that doesn't weigh much.

Disadvantages: they don't sell the Amazon Kindle in Europe. The Kindle has a wireless network called "Whispernet" that makes purchasing books (while standing in the United States) very convenient. Just click, and the purchase is made. With my current situation in Switzerland, it is not as convenient.

Amazon has deals with books to get the books into Kindle format, but that deal only applies to people in the United States. In order to get a Kindle, while living in Europe, you have to present Amazon a US-based Credit Card with a US-based Address. (And I have the advantage of being an American with these things at my disposal). There is a work-around to download these books to an Internet-connected computer, and download them to the Kindle over a USB cable. So the incredible convenience of downloading books over the Whispernet is lost, but the convenience of having a lightweight copy of all my books in one place is not lost.

I think I am going to go ahead with this, and I'll let you know how it all works out. In the meantime, I am planning all of the e-books that I have been meaning to read all these years, that I will add to my reading list. The BBC allegedly put together a list of the fiction that everybody should have read, and the average person has read only 6 of them.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

( ) 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
( ) 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
( ) 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
( ) 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
( ) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
( ) 6 The Bible (most)
( ) 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
( ) 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
( ) 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
( ) 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

( ) 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
( ) 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
( ) 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
( ) 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most)
( ) 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
( ) 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
( ) 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
( ) 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
( ) 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
( ) 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

( ) 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
( ) 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
( ) 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
( ) 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
(x) 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
( ) 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
( ) 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
( ) 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
( ) 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
( ) 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

( ) 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
( ) 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
( ) 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
( ) 34 Emma - Jane Austen
( ) 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
( ) 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
( ) 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
( ) 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
( ) 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
( ) 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

( ) 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
( ) 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
( ) 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
( ) 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
( ) 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
( ) 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
( ) 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
( ) 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
( ) 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
( ) 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

( ) 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
( ) 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
( ) 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
( ) 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
( ) 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
( ) 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
( ) 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
( ) 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
( ) 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
( ) 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(x) 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
( ) 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
( ) 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
( ) 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
( ) 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
(x) 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
( ) 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
( ) 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
( ) 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
( ) 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

( ) 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
( ) 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
( ) 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
( ) 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
( ) 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
( ) 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
( ) 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
( ) 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
( ) 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
( ) 80 Possession - AS Byatt

( ) 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
( ) 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
( ) 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
( ) 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
( ) 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
( ) 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
( ) 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
( ) 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
( ) 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
( ) 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

( ) 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
( ) 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
( ) 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
( ) 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
( ) 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
( ) 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
( ) 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
( ) 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
( ) 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
( ) 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Wow, I suck; I have read only 3 of these, and two of them were because of a class in college. Maybe the person who came up with this list was one of those evil English teachers that simply likes to torture children with melodramatic crap from the Victorian era. Now that I see this list, I honestly don't see myself buying any of these books online.

Maybe the real reason I want a Kindle is summed up in this episode of xkcd: