When my wife and I first started with Team Expansion, we served in Montevideo, Uruguay, South America. We took one afternoon and evening per week as a Sabbath. We’d ride the bus into the center of the city and visit the USA/Uruguayan Alliance Library, where we could read 2- and 3-day old newspapers shipped down via passenger planes from the states. And when the new edition of Popular Photography came, it was glorious.
That was 1982.
This is 2012.
Times have changed — and Amazon’s Kindle is a game-changer. Until this past week, I hadn’t quite digested exactly what a sea-change it is. Imagine a worker in an outlying town in Afghanistan. Prior to departing her homeland, she subscribes to the print form of a leading newspaper — like USA Today, for instance. She can have it mailed anywhere: her parents’ house, her church, her favorite dentist’s office… it really doesn’t matter. Because with the data from that print subscription, she can now use her Kindle in Afghanistan to download the Kindle edition (the entire newspaper, re-flowed in a format to fit the screen of her Kindle e-reader). And it doesn’t cost her a dime extra! All she has to do is walk to a coffee shop or internet café. Her Kindle only has to see Wi-Fi for about 2 minutes max. During that 2 minutes, it will download the entire newspaper, and then she can walk home and read today’s news in the privacy of her own back yard (if she has grass).
And it’s not just ONE newspaper: There are zillions of choices. Entire BOOKS! Tons of them. And when she reads, she highlights them on her Kindle, and later, she can export the highlighted quotes into text form for her note files on her laptop.
What’s more, although these devices originally were expensive, they’ve dropped significantly in price now. If you’re willing to go with a SLIGHTLY dated model (that is, something with a color screen from 6 months ago), you’re looking at something under $150. There are lower prices if you’ll settle for black and white. And the word on the street is that Apple will soon release its own competition for the Kindle, which might help lower prices even more.
So if you’ve ever wanted to end your back/shoulder pain (and stop carrying around all those heavy books), now is a really good time.
And don’t forget, you can still bump up to a iPad or ultrabook (though you might have to spend $400 or more to do so, depending on your tastes), then download the Kindle app — and you get the best of both worlds!
My wife and I never imagined, as we sat in that library in 1982, that just 30 years later, today’s workers would have everything so IMMEDIATELY. Now let’s hope it helps us all share the Good News of Jesus more quickly too. :-)
So what about you? What do you like about your Kindle (or other e-reader)? And … upon which e-Reader did you settle and why? Just click “comment” below and share your own testimony about how your e-reader changed YOUR life. Feel free to do so anonymously if you prefer. And thanks in advance for sharing your story!
I have a Nook (given as a gift) and Kindle for PC on my computer. They have both been a real help with my research for my doctoral research, for inspirational reading and for pleasure reading. One thing that is nice about the e-readers is that there are all sorts of free books out there, so you can continually renew your library. One resource I found recently is http://www.jungledealsandsteals.com. You can sign up for a free newsletter that sends out the latest free Kindle books. Some are cheesy romances, or worse! But there is often some promotion on good Christian books. For example, today one of the free Kindle books is Drawing Near to the Heart of God: Encouragement for Your Lifetime Journey (Navpress Devotional Readers) by Cynthia Heald. Since I live in West Africa where libraries are few and far between, I find these free books a real blessing.
I should say, the jungledealsandsteals sends out the TITLES for free Kindle books. You pick and choose what you want to download. You can do this on your computer, even if you don’t have a Kindle.
Deanna, your testimony from the front lines makes it all the more real! Thanks for taking time to respond!
I fell in love with Kindle format books before someone gave me a Kindle. The free readers for all my platforms mean I can download a book now to my laptop, use my keyboard to annotate as I read, export my notes for other use or publish them to the internet, and access the material plus notes from my full variety of devices. Not only is the device itself a game changer, so are the free readers for your existing devices.
Robby, good point. Glad you emphasized the free readers for existing devices.
As of 2 years ago, we didn’t own any format of e-reader. Now we have 2 Kindles, an iPad and an iTouch (both with Kindle apps). I love the Kindle for 2 reasons – I can expose my children to literature that I loved as a kid, as well as have instant access to my master’s program textbooks (if available in ebook, which most are now). If you are on social networking at all, and you are considering an ereader for the first time, just ask your contacts if they have an old one that they don’t use anymore. People upgrade their devices so often, that there is a good chance someone has one somewhere. We got both of our Kindle’s that way (one for each kid) – we don’t mind if they are used and black and white. They work and my kids love reading because of them.
Emily, great advice — and helpful!
Doug, I “love” your 1982 illustration. I can go back a few years to 1970 in the jungles of Peru when I caught myself reading a Ladies Home Journal, just to read something in English!
But, yes, I, too, am having to jump the generations to embrace the new media recorders. We are preparing our book, SERVING AS SENDERS~TODAY for eBook. I was proofing it on my assistant’s daughter’s Kindle. I “caught” myself at one point trying to turn the page…from the upper right-hand corner!
Neal, that’s CLASSIC! :-)
We have lived in East Africa for 26 years. A few years ago, I started with Stanza on my computer and iPhone and soon added Kindle, Nook, Good Reader, iBooks, Calibre, etc. apps to both. I thought long and hard about a Kindle eReader because I wasn’t sure if I would use it since I had the iPhone and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted one more electronic device. I finally hinted to my wife that I wanted a Kindle Tough 3G for Christmas (she was in the US just before) and have never looked back. In fact, I bought her one for her birthday. I’ve read far, far more than ever before and I have always been a voracious reader.
Most of what I get are free books — I watch the Christian sites, vesselproject.com and inspiredreads.com, and the secular site, kindlenationdaily.com, for good, free books. We also borrow books from our US library’s ebook collection — if you have a valid library card/membership, most US libraries now loan eBooks for 2-3 weeks. By using the library, we’re able to read new bestsellers as well as older books at no cost.
There are a number of other sources for free or inexpensive books. Some of the secular sources carry ALL KINDS of books, so you have to be willing to sort through some real junk. But ministries like Exponential (check https://www.exponential.org/2012/09/dreaming-big-for-church-planters/), Desiring God, Verge, Catalyst, even seminaries (for example, http://www.swbts.edu/epubs) also often provide quality, free eBooks.
My field job is to oversee and coordinate training for our personnel throughout the continent and with partners. Almost 100% of our new personnel come to Africa with eReaders (most with either a Kindle eReader, iPad, or Kindle Fire). This has both reduced our costs and made it much easier to purchase and distribute books that we want personnel to read, especially first-termers.