Clients demand and deserve a well-informed advisor. To help you stay on top the news and best thinkers, you may want to consider purchasing an Amazon Kindle.
If you commute daily via public transit, read a lot of books, travel often, or want to read while exercising, then the Amazon Kindle is probably good idea.The Kindle is a Amazon's wireless reading device. You can buy books for less than you'd pay online and get newspapers delivered daily into this lightweight device. At $359, it's not inexpensive. But if you qualify for any of the groups outlined above and are not on a tight budget, then you'll get your money's worth.
I bought my Kindle about six months ago after seeing it at a friend's house. He reads a lot of books and raved about it. Gadget-freak that I am, I had to have one. I received a $100 discount by opening an Amazon Visa card account, a special no longer offered. In fact, the Kindle proved so popular during the holiday season that Amazon ran out of them and remains out of stock. The main features:
·High-resolution highly-legible screen
·You'll learn how to use it in 30 seconds
·Wireless connectivity from almost everywhere
·Buy books wirelessly in less than a minute
·Most New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99
·Top newspapers including delivered wirelessly daily
·About the size of a thin hardcover book and weighs only 10.3 ounces
·Holds about of months the New York Times of newspapers or over 200 books
·Battery lasts three days, maybe four and recharges in 2 hours
The Kindle is not for you if you read your newspapers over the Web and do not read a lot of books. However, if you read more than a book a month and are an avid newspaper reader who does not read papers on the Internet, it can be a handy item.
I don't read newspapers online because I'm too busy at work. I read the newspaper while I am exercising. I place my Kindle on my elliptical trainer. If you use a treadmill or stationery bike, it'll work for you, too. Four or five times a week, I put on my Bluetooth headphones, which are synched up with my cell phone, and I play my favorite music while also watching CNN with the Closed Captions running. And while I am listening to music and watching CNN, I read the NY Times and Financial Times. Being bombarded by all this media makes me forget I'm exercising, and I keep my heart rate at about 140 beats per minute for 60 minutes.
I've always read the NY Times daily and turning pages of the broadsheet while on the elliptical is annoying. Over the years, I've tried out many reading racks that attach to my exercise machine, but nothing is as easy as the Kindle. Plus, the type is slightly larger. The NY Times Kindle Edition costs $10 a month, and so does FT. I would drop daily delivery of the Times to our door if my wife and kids did not need it. That would make the Kindle a money-saver.
The Kindle has allowed me to read FT regularly for the first time in my life. For this reason alone, it was worthwhile investment. FT is a great newspaper. You get a different perspective on the financial crisis. One disappointment is that the Kindle edition of FT does not include FT's many fine columnists, like Martin Wolf. (Fortunately, you can get RSS feeds of FT columnists delivered into your computer with a free subscription to FT.)
I don't read many books because I'm a news junkie. For bookworms, however, the Kindle can be a money-saver. Books cost about half as much and you don't pay tax on them. Plus, you don't have to go to a bookstore and can carry your entire library with you in your brief case. It's convenient when you go on vacation and want to bring two or three books.
For me, the big benefit of the Kindle is that it lets me multi-task while I exercise. It's important that I exercise because I like to eat, especially deserts. So it's good that I burn calories while reading The Times. With the Kindle, I can have my cake and read it, too.