I bought a Kindle in 2009 and since then I’ve been keeping track of my reading statistics on Goodreads. My previous year’s stats are in brackets, though the 2009 post is a little difficult to decipher since I wasn’t interested in my overall reading stats. Total books read for 2011 (not including picture books/board books): 51   [2010: 49 ; 2009: 85(?) had to go look on Goodreads since I hadn’t listed it in the post] # of e-books read: 26 [12 ; 25(?) ] # of physical books (p-b

So I thought I’d get the ball rolling again by doing an easy post about my book numbers for 2010 (here’s last year’s). I got my Kindle 2 in February 2009 and since then, I have definitely been converted to e-books. I looove e-books. I do like p-books (i.e. physical books) now and then, mostly for those that look really pretty or have lots of nice pictures (graphic novels, picture books, board books), but when I want to read a novel, I always check and see if I can get a copy

Here are my stats (made easier by Goodreads–I might have to add a new bookshelf for e-books): Books I actually purchased from the Amazon store: 5 Free books I downloaded from Amazon: 9 (all classics and one cookbook–I only actually ended up finishing one of them) Books/audiobooks downloaded and finished reading from the library (this one is an estimate since I delete them afterward): 20! wow! — I shouldn’t admit this but most of them have been frivolous chick lit that I proba

Via The New Yorker’s Book Bench: Apparently the world’s largest book is Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Himalayan Kingdom by MIT’s Michael Hawley available from Amazon.com by Friendly Planet for $30,000. Wow. I am definitely putting this one on my Xmas wish list :) Photo by JasonUnbound / CC BY-NC 2.0 #amazon #links #newyorker

I haven’t blogged about this yet because for some reason I though Barnes and Noble’s e-reader had already been announced (probably due to all the speculation online about it). Anyway, from the website, B&N’s Nook features many snazzy things that Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t: a color touch screen LCD, “library view” for scrolling through your books, Wifi, memory expansion capabilities, a PDF viewer…and it costs about the same. But for me the biggest thing is: the ability to lend yo

this e-reader (called the Readius) looks really cool to me, but I guess they’ve been having trouble finding investors. I wish I could get a closer look at it. I wonder how durable the flexible screen is, but then, I’m sure my Kindle isn’t as durable as Amazon claims (and I’m not willing to test it out). #amazon #ereader #kindle #video

I have to eat my words. I previously posted a blog entry about how I wasn’t sure I would like the Kindle, but now that I actually have one…I love it!! I love being able to download books and read them right away. There’s no more waiting til the bookstore/library opens and the screen is absolutely amazing! Also I thought the lag between page turns would be annoying, but it isn’t; I really don’t notice it when I’m reading. Plus I love the dictionary feature. You simply point th

I wanted to mention my friend Samidh’s new software Pluribo, a free plugin for Firefox that will sift through reviews on websites and summarize them for you. It is pretty cool. So far it only supports specific electronic products on Amazon.com, but eventually it will be expanded to include more products and more websites. I hope they include book reviews soon since that’s what I mostly look at on Amazon, but the great thing is you don’t have to keep downloading new updates.

I am still not a convert. One would think that I would be after having read all of Mansfield Park on my Palm during downtime in medical school (when I should have been studying). I just enjoy the feel and weight of an actual book in my hands and reading something on a screen is just not the same. There is no new book smell, no actual flipping of pages, no cool colorful bookmarks, or dog-eared pages (and no paper cuts). Not to mention…how could you possibly enjoy illustration