My lovely wife bought me a Kindle as a gift and I’ve been playing with it the first few days. So far, I love this thing.

I’ve been spending a few days hoarding free books that I can find all over the internet. Amazon has a bunch of free books on their site but also recommends other repositories. Project Gutenberg is pretty damn slick. Plus, today I found a totally free collection of HP Lovecraft’s works over at CthulhuChick.com. Well done, Ruth. You rock!

Amazon also has this nifty way of getting books to your Kindle. By registering your device, you have a specific @kindle.com email address assigned (managed on amazon.com) and you can send books as attachments in an email and they’ll show up the next time your e-reader connects to the web. It accepts zip files as well as .mobi files and a few other formats. Plus, they keep a hold of the books you send over email so that if you accidentally delete something, like I already have, you can just pull it up under the Personal Documents section of the Kindle management page and resend it to your device.

I was a bit of a naysayer when these things first came out, but I can definitely see the benefit of having one. Now I just wish I could squeeze my huge-ass hardcover copy of the Autobiography of Mark Twain into digital format without buying it again, because that thing is freaking heavy.