E-readers for Writers

I recently - after a lot of thought -  bought an e-reader to make travelling with books a lot easier. The Ryan Air luggage allowance doesn’t give you space for reading matter and I’m tired of sneaking through security with a paper-back crushed into every pocket, as well as wearing my entire wardrobe!


In the end I bought a Kindle (sorry!) because they’ve got the 3G capability anywhere in the world where there’s a satellite - it works here, where other internet technologies don’t and I’m hoping it will work in Cuba and Cambodia. They now come with the new ink screen technology that handles graphics and is very easy to read. It doesn’t hurt your eyes like a computer screen and is perfectly visible in sunlight. I’ve also discovered that I can use the reader to check my email, and download newspapers, magazines and blogs that I regularly follow.  I had distinct reservations about E-books, but I'm completely won over now.
What I didn’t realise was that the e-reader could be such a useful tool for a writer. I can load my Work In Progress onto it from my computer, as a text file, and then sit out in the sun and edit it. The Kindle allows me to highlight sections I want to change and to add notes of text I want to insert. Then, when I go indoors to my computer, it will show me the list of edits I’ve made so that I can alter the text on my hard-drive. I’ve never been able to work out of doors like this before. It has a built-in dictionary - and I could also download a Thesaurus to look up words instantly while I’m writing.

I can see a lot of possibilities here. The machine has an audio capability so that you can be read to if you feel lazy, and it handles the new ‘enhanced’ E-books. Apparently you can get editions of books that include music and pictures to accompany the text - a whole new reading experience. This technology is going to change things - I wonder how long it will be before we’re all writing with the E-reader in mind?