I've had my Kindle for a few weeks now. I bought it because I wanted a new gadget, which I hoped would turn out to be useful. I have to admit that I didn't spend ages pondering over it: I read a few reviews, a couple of comparisons, and once it was clear enough to me that the Kindle has the best screen screen for an ebook reader, I went for it.

Am I happy with it? Yes, it's a nice gadget with a clean design and I have been reading on it a lot since I have it. Would I recommend it to someone who doesn't feel quite ready to give up paperbacks? Not really, no. Not yet at least. I have a few reasons for this, and I'll start with what I think is more of an opinion rather than a fact. Buying an ebook is not quite the same as buying a book. Someone argued with me that this is true also for music albums, yet the market of online music has exploded in the past few years whereas that of cd's has constantly declined. There's one difference between the two things: the actual fruition is different. You need a player for a cd, and so you do for an mp3. The latter is much smaller and contains way more music, so the appeal is huge. With books it's not the same: you read the book itself and buying a new book means actually getting a new object that will stay with you at least until you finish it. But again, this is only my opinion, and it's anyway easy to see the appeal of having hundreds of books in a small device rather than in massive bookshelves that take a lot of space. The second reason I have is more technical. I think the technology isn't quite ready yet for this kind of devices. Don't get me wrong: I don't regret my purchase. Still, I have the feeling of using a 20 year old computer. The difference is that if the refresh of the screen is slow, that's not because of a slow processor, rather because of the screen technology, not to mention the fact that it can't display colours. As a consequence of the slow refresh, reactions to user commands are slow as well and touch screen is necessarily ages away. This means that reading a pdf which was not in the first place formatted for a Kindle-size page is awkward to say the least. The holy grail here would be a device with the same user experience as an iPhone (or an iPad) but with an eInk screen that doesn't require back lighting and doesn't kill your eyes after an hour or more of reading. Even if the first colour eInk screens are due to appear next year, I think there's still a long way to go before ebook readers will be able to be effective substitutes of books.