In this post, I’ll argue that, if you read anything, you should get a Kindle. I’ll give what I believe the more important advantages of a Kindle. I’ll also argue against common objections.
No, this is article is not sponsored by Amazon. Nor does it have affiliated links. I’m being honest, seriously.
Reasons
- Save space. This is incredibly important for me:
- I’ve read more than 200 books since my mid-teenage years. My room would be crowded if I had them all here.
- It’s an step towards minimalism.
- Have all your books in the same place.
- If you are at university, you won’t have to carry books to campus from your permanent address (and back).
- If you want to do some holiday reading, you won’t have to make space in your suitcase for books!
- It’s light and small.
- You can literally take it anywhere with you:
- You can read on the underground and it won’t be a pain to carry around afterwards.
- You can read on a plane!
- You can read on a dead spots.
- Pro tip: always take it with you – you won’t know when you’ll need it!
- You can literally take it anywhere with you:
- Save money.
- From my experience, Kindle editions are about 2-10 pounds cheaper than their corresponding paperback edition.
- Classics can be found in the internet for free (they no longer have copyrights).
- Highlights.
- If you read non-fiction this is amazing. You can highlight (and takes notes) while reading. These notes get syncronized to your amazon account (and also to your goodreads, if you have one).
- Buy books instananeously.
- This is probably the most important point. It’ll removes almost all friction to start reading a new book.
- Connect your Kindle to your WiFi. You can search all Amazon ebooks and buy them from your Kindle device. They’ll appear on your device instantaneously.
- No need to forecast when you’ll finish a book. You don’t need to plan a trip to a bookstore or order a physical book.
- Samples.
- If you’re not sure you’ll like a book, you can get a free sample from Amazon. This works exactly in the same way as buying the actual book. After your finish the sample, you’re literally one click away from buying the whole book.
- Note: I’m a big fan of not overthinking the decision to buy a book or not. Books can to change your life (a huge positive potential) while only a small downside cost (losing 3 to 10 pounds). In general, if you find a book you may like, just buy it. (And if you don’t like it, stop reading it.)
- If you’re not sure you’ll like a book, you can get a free sample from Amazon. This works exactly in the same way as buying the actual book. After your finish the sample, you’re literally one click away from buying the whole book.
Common objections
- I love physical books.
- Great. But you’ll love your ebook too!
- But it’s not the same.
- Of course not. It’ll be better, you’ll read more.
- You use light bulbs instead of candles, don’t you?
- But I want to support printing offices.
- Well, now you’ll support another sector of the economy.
- If you could, you’d pick an Uber or Cabify instead of a taxi, wouldn’t you?
- If that matters to you, keep track of the money you save by buying kindle editions instead of paper editions. Then donate that money. To printing offices, if you actually want (but consider donations to more effective causes).
- Well, now you’ll support another sector of the economy.
- It’s hard to use.
- No, it’s not. There’s no learning curve.
- Plus, the battery lasts weeks.
- It’s expensive.
- You can certainly get one by less than 100 pounds. (This may or not be a lot for you.)
- Mine is quite old. I expect the cheapest version currently available to be at least as good as mine. It works perfectly, you don’t really need a fancier version.
- Let’s say you save, on average, 4 pounds per book. Then you’d pay the ebook after reading 25 books.
- For me, this means less than a year. For you it may be more or less time. As along as you read (an amount with a positive lower-bound), you’ll eventually pay it.
- Even if ebooks had the same price as physical books, a Kindle would be worth it. It’s an excellent investment on yourself.
- The reading experience is much beter.
- You’ll read more.
- You can certainly get one by less than 100 pounds. (This may or not be a lot for you.)
- What about a non-kindle e-reader?
- I had one of these before, and it’s still better than physical books. However:
- You can’t have highlights, get samples, or buy books instantenously.
- Finding books for my old ebook was hard: I couldn’t use the amazon store, I had to download them into my PC, convert them to epub format, and then use a wire to transfer them to my ebook. It added a lot of friction (and had to be done in advance).
- You can’t have highlights, get samples, or buy books instantenously.
- I had one of these before, and it’s still better than physical books. However:
- What about reading on the Kindle app of a mobile phone or tablet?
- (This option is another a reason to read kindles. If you ever forget your kindle or it runs out of battery, you can keep reading in your phone -it’ll take you to the last page you read on your Kindle.)
- It’s better for your eyes to read on an ebook than in other electronic devices.
- Especially if you like to read in bed, a Kindle is like a paperbook.
- You can read in a kindle no matter how much light there is.
- Psychologically, I find very useful to a separate place to read.
- In general, it removes distractions. No messages will ever pop up while you’re reading on a kindle. There’ll be no temptation to read your emails or check Facebook.
- It creates a separation from your work space.
- I use my iPad exclusively for “deep” work things. When I finish working, I make sure I really finish by switching it off. It makes a clear separation between “work” and “not-work”, which is important (especially working from home).
- This also works the other way around: I’m not tempted to open the Kindle app when I should be working!
- Switch-off from electronic devices before going to sleep.
- You should do this to improve your sleep!
- I switch my phone off at around 10 pm (my ipad has been switched off before that).
- Again, no temptation to reply to your messages, scroll through your pictures or google a random post.
- You should do this to improve your sleep!
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Maria A. Gutierrez 
Very interesting post Maria. You’ve made me to reflex about my reading habits…maybe I change!
In any case I wonder if you don’t worry to use this electronic device prior to sleep…
Thanks! Kindles don’t ’emit’ light – unlike a phone, you cannot read a kindle in the dark- neither do they have sounds or notifications
Very interesting! However, I disagree about Kindle “supporting other sectors of the economy”. Amazon has a yearly revenue of more than 280 billion dollars, and it certainly does not need any support.
On the other hand, book shop and printing offices are going out of business because of Amazon’s incredibly aggressive marketing strategies, leaving them out of the market — as you have mentioned, lower prices and “more comfort”, something small book shops cannot really compete with.
As an enthusiastic book reader and book-shop lover myself, I think it is important we support the book-shop industry. I understand that there are slight disadvantages to this (paying a bit more, for example), but in the same way I am happy to pay a few pounds to watch a film instead of pirating it, I am happy to make this extra effort. Of course, buying it off Amazon is not the same as illegally downloading it, but I do think it is somewhat contributing to an unethical market monopoly that is heavily damaging millions of independent book shops and businesses.
Thank you for your comment. That is a very good point, and you’re probably right about Amazon not being particularly helpful.
However, I disagree with “it is important..”. It’s a very well-minded idea, but I’ll argue that there are better (more effective) ways of spending your money and/or effort with altruistic purposes:
Firstly, your argument seems to imply that we should also be more selective when purchasing other items, eg:
-Should we not buy clothes that have been made in sweatshops in [insert Asian country]? Should we instead spend extra time and money finding and buying clothing that guarantees us decent labour conditions?
-Should we only buy fairtrade food?
-Should we not travel by plane because of its CO2 emissions? Or spend money compensating “offsetting” the CO2 costs?
-What about the trees that are culled to print books?
Of course, some people do that, but most people don’t, and those who try will probably find it exhausting and quit long-run (I tried ethical clothing for about 1.5 years). And there are just so many similar problems you could think of, that you would end up paralysed.
Instead, since you seem to care about ‘doing good’, I think it’s better to devote your money/effort into a few causes that seem very important to you, and that you can help efficiently. To phrase it in another way, if I gave you 100$ (which I am going to assume it is your yearly extra cost from buying paper books instead of ebooks, although the exact quantity doesn’t matter) to spend in a charitable cause of your choice, which one would you choose? You could, for example:
-Gift that money to the owner of your favourite local book-shop;
-Gift that money to a homeless of your local community;
-Donate that money to a highly effective charity, like the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) or GiveDirectly, or to an animal welfare charity (campaigning against factory farming which in my opinion is totally unethical), etc.
I’d certainly choose the latter: I don’t know where in the world you live, but you seem to have access to the internet, so that’s better than half of the global population. 100$ in [insert low-income country] go way further than they do here, where living costs are much higher (by various orders of magnitude). For example, statistically speaking (on average), AMF prevents a child from dying from malaria with about 3000$ in donations. So if you kept reading for 30 years, buying kindles and donating the difference in price to AMF, you would have saved a life.
And of course, your book-shop would not benefit from losing you as a life-long client. But it’s hard to see how losing one client would mean having to close the business. Even if it did, the owner would most likely not starve because of having to close it since he/she may be able to find another job, or would have support from their family/government/local community, etc.
Sorry if that feels a bit preachy – it’s not my intention!
If you would like to read more about this (in a way explained better than what I did above), I’d recommend checking out http://www.effectivealtruism.org or, since you love books, reading ‘Doing Good Better’ by William MacAskill.
Dear Maria,
Thanks for a very informative and interesting response. Of course, I do not deny that it is impossible to be completely committed to every possible social cause, and I agree each of us should get to choose which causes are more worth our time/money/effort.
I am well aware of effective altruism and I agree, to some extent, with its principles.
However, there are boundaries. This is the reason why I left my previous comment, not to criticise the fact that you are not doing all you can to save book shops or to fight inequality in the world in general — this would be absurd and patronising, and obviously, I have not sold my laptop to donate that money to charity either. I do think that Amazon is beyond those boundaries; not only they are destroying a big part of the book industry, but also they are using extremely unethical strategies for this purpose: tax evasion, terrible conditions for its employees, environment issues, etc., not to mention the aggressive monopoly they are creating.
Effective altruism is great, but I think it needs to be used carefully. I do think each of us has a minimum of social responsibility: using similar logic, one could argue that stealing their shop each week at the supermarket and donating those 20 quid to an NGO would have a far more positive impact on society than not doing it (as I have pointed out earlier, it is obvious that buying books off Amazon is not the same thing as stealing, but I hope I can get my point across). Then, I could argue that we should not only measure the scope of our decisions by quantifying their impact, but also by taking into account some underlying, moral principles: I know pirating a film and donating that money to refugees would probably help more people than buying a ticket, but I also firmly believe in the recognition of artwork, and that society as a whole should do that too. I do not think society should tolerate Amazon, its terrible practices and the huge impact it has had (I think this is also a relevant point: if Amazon were just some random company selling ebooks at a lower price, I would have no problem with it, it is also the scale in which this is done), and I think it is a small effort on our side not to buy books off them (not even going to try to convince anyone not to use Amazon).
I do hope I did not come across as preachy either — as I have said, it is a very good and informative post. I just wanted to point out a different perspective and my personal opinion on why Amazon should be, if possible, avoided.