I love my books. My hard or soft cover real touchable books with that certain papery smell. I love how my books start to look more worn with every time I am readying them again. My dream for the future: having a big bookshelf in my apartment/house in white, covered with glass doors, holding all my precious books I started collecting since I was a little girl.
I was lucky enough that my parents encouraged me to read. I got a library card when I was around 6 years old and read my way around the children and youth section. Several times around that is. I am also the proud owner of all “Dolly” books (in English/British they are called Mallory Tower series I think), I have almost all “Süderhof” books and “Hanni and Nanni” is also not missing in my (children’s) collection. Though those books are for now savely stored away at my parents’ house (mom, if you are reading this: I hope you did not dare to touch the 4 book boxes in the basement) I hope to be reunited with them in the near future.
And my book collection grew over the years and continued to move with me several times (4 times to the day). But as much as I love my real books, which I can touch: we just do not have space to store them anymore at the moment as our apartment is just too small. And I do not want to put them in the slightly moist basement. They are my beloved books after all. So for now I caved in and got something I thought I would never get because I used to hate it: a Kindle.
I decided for the Kindle Paperwhite and it cost me around 120 Euro on the German Amazon. However, the Kindle editions of books are quite a bit cheaper than the paperback versions, so I already saved around 50 Euro on books and will soon have the money “back”, which I initially spend on the Kindle.
As you can see the Kindle is quite a bit smaller than the regular sized iPad. I cannot recall the size of the iPad mini, but the Kindle fits easily into my hand and has more the size of a book. This makes it nice for reading though a bit difficult for pdf documents (as my boyfriend discovered).
The outer cover of the Kindle is some kind of “rubber” material. Nice for holding it but prone for smudges of any kind. It reminds me a lot of the material NARS uses for their products (for the beauty people among us, lol). I am unfortunately still waiting for the cover I ordered and I will not have it until later this month, you can therefore already see how “used” it looks after just a few weeks.
Advantage of the Paperwhite is that you are able to switch the light of the screen. When you are in well-lit rooms you can turn the light all the way up and when it is darker around you, you can turn it all the way down. It makes reading so much better and even with the lights out you can still read in bed 
A little feature, which I both love and hate: The Kindle shows you how much is left of your book. It cannot really show you page numbers as you can also change the size of the writing but it shows you how much you have read already in a percent number. If you love the book this is actually quite sad – you want to keep on reading, no? It also gives you an average of how much reading time is left both in the book and in the chapter (it switches in-between), based on your own reading average.
Even though the Kindle Paperwhite has a touchscreen it cannot be compare dwith an iPad. When you touch the top of the screen a sidebar appears and you can choose what you want to do.
When you touch the button with the house (home button obviously, duh) you get into the front menu, showing all your books which you loaded on the Kindle.
Another interesting feature is that below the book name you can see how much of the book you already have read. Bold dots = read, small dots = to be read. I think this is a nice little thing instead of the percentage number.
I cannot exactly say how long the battery holds except: long. I am still on my second round of battery and that is within several weeks now (and yes, I do love to read and read a lot).
The Kinde is being delivered with a charging cord so you can charger it over the computer, and the computer only. Should you however have an Apple product though you can put the USB end into the Apple charger instead of the computer.
I think for travelling and if you do not want to have books standing around at home this is a nice gadget to have, which makes life pretty easy. As a book lover it can never fully replace my beloved books but for now it will have to do
Love, S.
