Kindle 3 - A Study in Desire

Browse, browse, browse. Read, read, read. Click-link, click-link, click-link.

Oh, interesting video! It's Steven Johnson on his book Where Good Ideas Come From.

I watch the video, and then jump across to Amazon to consider buying the book. But I'm only considering. I'm still working through Crawford's Shop Craft As Soul Craft, and I have a stack of others in queue a-waiting. So I won't buy a new book at the moment. I'll just c-o-n-s-i-d-e-r.

Get to Amazon and, spookily. one of the items it offers for my consideration is Johnson. Cookies at work? Dunno. But anyway, I begin reaching to click to put it on my Wish List or Shopping List and it's then I notice the Kindle edition. The obsession begins.

Of course with my options increasingly rapidly, I don't actually do anything at this point. But my maximizing brain kicks in and I start the hunt: Kindle 3, Kindle DX, Nook, Sony Reader, and on, and on.

But then I step back for a second, and ask myself, why?. Why do I want one? Whence comes this sudden lust for another shiny object? Here are some of the reasons my brain (not me, mind) came up with, plus their rebuttals:

1. It will let me buy new books whenever I want. Trouble is, increasing the extent to which I can impulse buy books is the last thing I need! I have enough unread books as it is.
2. It will let me carry lots of books with me in one small widget. But, again, that's not a good thing for me. Choice, in the hands of a perfectionist maximizer, is debilitating. If I'm carrying one paper book with me on the plane and I decide "Sigh -- it's the wrong book", well tough. I'll just have to read it. But with a Kindle, the option to switch and chop and change will be ever present, and readily exercised.
3. It will let me read in bed without wife punching me in the eye 'cos the light is keeping her awake. Well no it won't; they don't have lights

Finally I realized, it's not at all what I need. The passion died. And by bedtime last night, I was safely reading my paper copy of Crawford again.

Phew.

 

 

Then today I went into Best Buy and bought one.