Curl up with… a Kindle?

I got a Kindle for Christmas, and before too long it found its way into the hands of Molly (9) and Anna (7).

If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon’s eReader, the Kindle, or eReaders in general, they’re portable electronic devices that allow you to download, store and read books wirelessly. Different from a laptop, most eReaders are not backlit, which means you can’t view the screen in the dark but you can read in bright sunlight, something you can’t do with a laptop. Most eReaders rely on something called eInk, which uses a low-power, high contrast “electronic paper.”

Curious to see what the Kindle could offer for my young readers, we browsed the Kindle store (opens in a new window) for Children’s Chapter Books (opens in a new window). Currently, there are 9 books for Baby-3 (among them Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes (opens in a new window) by Annie Kubler,) 903 ebooks for Ages 4-8 (including Nubs (opens in a new window) and Curious George (opens in a new window)), and over 2,400 books for ages 9-12, including The Lightning Thief (opens in a new window) and The Magician’s Elephant (opens in a new window).

Sadly, Harry Potter isn’t available (although several books about Harry Potter are). We also couldn’t find Judy Moody, another series my 7 year old likes. One nice feature of the Kindle store is that we could download samples of books before buying. We downloaded several samples, and they really helped us make our buying decision.

After all our browsing, we couldn’t really find a Kindle title that my 7 year old was dying to read, but we did end up downloading The Name of this Book is Secret (opens in a new window). As a digital native, Anna caught on to the device immediately, and didn’t seem to bring all the “reader issues” to the table that I do — I’m also reading a Kindle book, and am still trying to get past the concept that I’m not physically holding a book and not able to see the cover the way it was designed.

Will the Kindle change the world? (opens in a new window) I don’t know. It’s changed the look of my nightstand, for the time being. And it’s changed the look of our lunch table too. Beyond that, we’ll see!