Why I Sold My Kindle

I just shipped my Kindle to a new owner in Arizona. I know I’ll probably buy a future model someday. I just wasn’t ready for it now.

With music, television, movies, and newspapers, I rode the frenzied line between early adopter and old-media diehard. I spent way too much to have the 1st generation of the latest media player, but I tried my darnedest to hold on to the format that I grew up with.

It wasn’t too long ago that I maintained the practice of buying a CD, even if I had downloaded a leaked copy of the album months earlier. I have found it harder to swim against the current in the last few years. I can’t even remember the last time I stepped into a record store. I just ordered a real CD for the first time in over a year, and that was only because it was recorded by a friend.

I had the same reaction to newspapers. I would get The Washington Post every day, but in the end, I couldn’t rationalize the amount of paper I seemed to be wasting. I find that I get nearly the same pleasure by reading the paper online, especially when it’s done in such an eye-pleasing fashion, like the New York Times. I do occasionally get a Sunday paper, but it has become a luxury.

I thought I was ready for a similar transition when the Kindle came out. I always looked longingly at Sony Readers, but they didn’t quite have that extra thing to put me over the edge. When the Kindle came out, with the ability to download a book on a whim, I ordered one.

I loved using it. Sure, it’s ugly, but it did it’s job well. I loved taking it on trips, without the load of a couple heavy books. It was really nice to pay just 75¢ for a copy of the Sunday New York Times. Being able to look up a word you didn’t know can’t be understated.

I realized it probably wasn’t going to be a lasting relationship when I started separating what I would buy for the Kindle vs. what I wanted as a hard copy. Books that had pretty covers or were written by authors I had liked in the past went in the hard copy pile. Classics and guilty pleasures were downloaded to the Kindle. The final straw came when I decided I wanted to go into a bookstore, have a cup of coffee, and buy the new Michael Pollan book. I basically had a choice between these two things:

That evening I put the Kindle on eBay.

Compared to music and newspapers, the digitization of books puts a particularly sharp dagger in my heart. I know that we’ll all eventually be carrying an eBook reader on our trips to the moon, I just decided I’m not going to be the one leading the charge.