Why?

Posted by Ace on May 10th, 2011 filed in letters from Ace

My son now has a Kindle.

He paid for it himself, with money he saved up from his birthday and other gift-giving occasions.  And he apparently did some cost/benefit analysis regarding various e-readers, assessing weight and price and visibility in daylight and a few other things I’ve forgotten.  So I really don’t have anything to say about it, at least with regard to dismissing it as an impulse buy on his part, or bemoaning it as one more addition to the sheer number of gadgets he has.  I just don’t get why he wants it.  He doesn’t do a tremendous amount of reading on his own, outside of his school assignments.  His favorite sort of reading is to have me read to him, at bedtime.

He did comment that now it would no longer be necessary for him to go the Library, because if there was a book he wanted, he could just download it.  Although he conceded that there would be a fee to do so, and that the presence of a Pay to Download structure was something that required some additional thought and responsibility (and money.)  He’s already familiar with such a structure from downloading games for his DSI through the Nintendo store.

His mother, meanwhile, having apparently enabled his downloading through her Amazon account, is now trying to figure out how to disable the One Click Buy controls, which suggests she doesn’t have much confidence in his ability for self-moderation…


2 Responses to “Why?”

  1. yoko Says:

    Does he want you to read from the Kindle? Or does he have books for his school assignments that he can get through the Kindle? (I guess it’s a little early for summer reading lists.)

    He could go to the library for e-books if he had gotten a different e-reader, but that’s beside the point.

    Do you think he’ll start reading on his own with it?

  2. Ace Says:

    He has not asked me to read from the Kindle yet. We did have a very funny half-hour or so where he sat next to me on the couch, and he read from the Kindle and I read from an analog book, and we made fun of each other/ showed off what we thought the other couldn’t do (making a WHOP sound by closing the cover hard, fanning ourselves with the pages, looking up unfamiliar words via hypertext-implemented dictionary database…)

    I’m not sure if he has books for his school assignments that he can get through the Kindle. All of the reading assignments he has that I am aware of are “open” assignments, where he can pick the book he wants to read, as long as it isn’t a comic book or something with more pictures than words. He might have been aware that a different e-reader would allow him to download e-books from the library for free; on recollection, it seems as if he was implicitly acknowledging that when he pointed out that the Kindle downloads cost money. He just damn well doesn’t like the library. I don’t know why. He seems happy enough when I take him there.

    He might start reading on his own with it. He might already be reading on his own with it. I guess we’ll see.