Yesterday I decided to buy a Kindle. As a patriot, I even paid for next day delivery, since surely UPS deserves to be stimulated every bit as much as Amazon. Right? Today it came, I charged it up, and then dove into its guts to buy a book and try it out. Charles Stross’s Halting State seemed like a nice choice.
So I clicked on “Kindle Store,” and before I could even type in the name of the book Amazon offered up four recommendations. One of them was Halting State.
I dunno. That’s kind of scary. I’m pretty sure I’ve never bought a Stross book via Amazon, so how did they know? Does the Kindle read my mind? Brrr.
The book itself was easy to buy. Too easy, really: click “Buy” and you’re done. The Kindle magically comes preprogrammed with your Amazon account information, and I guess they just assume that anyone impatient enough to buy ebooks online also wants one-click shopping. A couple of minutes later the book was downloaded and ready to go. (They say it only takes a minute, but I appear to live in something of a Sprint dead zone, so it took a little longer.)
I shall report back after I’ve tried it out for a while. In the meantime, it’s pictured above, along with some suitable background material to show scale.
