How Getting Older Can Be Fun

Yes, I just had a birthday. I could tell you stories about being the first class in high school who were allowed to wear jeans to school....but I digress! I've decided I'm holding at 50 and no further. The other thing I've decided is I will never, ever, ever, be out of touch with the lightening speed of technology in our world. I refuse to sit back and be one of those middle-agers (I'm just at the very, very tail end of the Boomers) who can't use a computer, program their PVR, or use a cell phone that's only two inches high.

To this end, my husband bought me a Sony eReader for my birthday. Now, before you all hoot and holler at the fact eReaders have been out for the past five years or so, those of us with teenagers who consume the better part of our paycheques know that Moms generally come last on the family list of fun toys.

I absolutely love it, and the fact it supports the universal format of EPUB and PDF. My husband prudently bought me the Pocket Edition and it truly does fit into a jacket pocket, or gets lost in my purses' dark interior. It's 5 inch screen is perfect for reading books or newspapers via subscription, and it's "heft" feels just like your normal mass market paperback.

It came with a $25 gift certificate to plug in to my account and give me a credit to buy a couple of books. I'm keeping an eye on the bestseller list, because it seems those will be the most profitable books todownload. They're still at their much debated price of $9.99 so my attitude is "get them while you still can".

And if I wasn't in the front guard of the ebook assault on publishing, at least I have my shiny, rose-metallic, skinny reader in it's faux leather white cover to keep track of those bestsellers now. I had a huge smile on my face last week when we traveled to a five star resort to spend a couple of days in Canada's largest indoor water park, and I could click on the key to turn pages as fast as my eyes could scan down the screen.

Did I mention you can also download "Calibre" software for free and it will allow you to slip books on to this eReader as well? It holds 350 books, which is more than our six huge bookcases combined. Now every time the military moves us, the poor kids making minimum wage to haul our furniture out to the moving van won't be complaining about their backs spasming due to our huge library. Well, not the future library, anyway.