Akako

“What is that?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked repeatedly of late. And also the biggest drawback of Amazon’s new ebook reader, the Kindle.

The Kindle is basically a really nice screen designed for reading text. Sounds boring, right? Pretty much.

Unless you happen to spend the vast majority of your time reading. Maybe you read a lot of books and articles for your job. Maybe you like to read a lot of magazines and newspapers. Maybe you like to read a lot of novels and history books. Maybe you do all of the above and don’t like the inconvenience of having so many books that it takes up half your house, you can never carry what you want with you, your eyes get screen fatigue by 5pm, etc. In that case, an e-ink ebook reader complete with an added 2 gig memory card is exactly what you want.

The screen is so gentle on the eyes you forget you’re reading from an electronic device. You can easily bookmark or highlight passages. You can switch between books at will with your place automatically saved and opened right back to the next time you select that reading. You can look up the definition of words inside the text using the built-in Oxford dictionary. You can carry your entire personal library with you all the time.

I’ve been putting a lot of medical material on it that I’ve gotten off the internet. I have access to several excellent resources like Uptodate and used to print out reams of paper for learning, reference and teaching. I now port it over to the Kindle so not only can I read it repeatedly without it getting all wrinkled and coffee stained, but I have it with me wherever I go. Journal articles are a little harder to port easily and in a readable format but really anything with text (and most pictures) is fair game.

There are other ebook readers out that, but one thing that Amazon added was a wireless radio, the same kind that is in my cellphone, and provided free access with it. It has a built-in portal to Amazon’s store whereby you can browse and buy your books anywhere Sprint has cellular service. You can also subscribe to newspapers (and magazines) and have them wirelessly delivered to your Kindle each morning. I tested out a free 14 day trial with the Wallstreet Journal and it worked amazingly. You can look up things on Wikipedia and even use the vast majority of the internet (text and basic pictures mostly).

The Kindle bestows +30 nerd points when equipped. e.g. Dr. V, my program director, future fellowship guru and at-that-time rotation attending kept telling me about this book The Tipping Point. So as we’re walking down the hall to see a patient, I took Akako (Amazon encourages you to name your device and given my fancy for Japanese females…) out of my white coat, downloaded it and started reading it before we even got to the patient’s room. Tech Nerd Five!

Overall, no matter how cool a device is, if it isn’t functional it isn’t worthwhile. At the end of the day, the Kindle has made my life much easier.

And why is that question a drawback? Because people only see Akako when I’m reading, which means I keep getting interrupted when studying.

Substory, my editor removed from the above: My whole family is full of avid readers. My brothers and I have whole walls covered with books. I owned over 200 books by the time I was 12. I used to get a kick out of people asking me “how many of those have you read” and seeing their bug-eyes at the reply “all of them, of course.”