First Kindle Experience? Meh.

John Podhoretz recommended Rick Marin's Keep Swinging as a good read and since I had a couple of bucks left on a gift card and a Kindle App on my i-Phone, I thought, well, why not?  I've used the Kindle App before to download samples of books and I found it was all right but it really wasn't a substitute for the real thing - swishing my finger over a glass screen to turn pages just wasn't doing it for me.  Maybe I wasn't giving it a chance.

Well, I gave it a chance with Keep Swinging - a delightful book about fatherhood and sports, by the way, and well worth the couple of bucks - and I was underwhelmed with the whole Kindle experience.  Maybe it was because I was using the i-Phone App - the teeny tiny screen was readable enough and though it isn't any big deal to turn the page, you have to turn a lot of pages to read what I thought was a small amount of text.  Distracting.  And I'm not sure the formatting is the same on Kindle - some passages could have used a paragraph break to better indicate a transition of time but maybe that's how it was edited in the first place.  I don't know.  It just didn't feel right.

Who am I to stand in the way of progress?  E-books are the future and real books are the dusty past.  It'd be nice to have an entire library at my disposal and some of the e-book deals I come across - a buck a throw, even free! - would be hard to pass up.  But for now, I'm content to let this wave of new-newfangledness pass me by.