reader.ly

The wonderful thing about sharing a Kindle with your spouse is that you can see where your tastes in books overlap (Malcolm Gladwell) and diverge (anything to do with sports or Jane Austen), without ever having to argue about whose books should be banished to the bottom shelf in the office. There are 52 items on our Kindle, 25 of which are free samples. Of the 27 complete books listed, I downloaded six. Remove the three items that come pre-loaded on the Kindle, and that means my husband Jason has downloaded 19 books since May, or almost the rate of one per week. I’ve read five or six of his selections. So in this period, he has read about 20 books on the Kindle, and I’ve read 11 eBooks and probably another five paper books. He still has me beat, which leads me to a couple of observations.

First, Jason is much more apt to download samples and then purchase the books he likes. I’m less decisive. I tend to read what comes across my desk/Kindle/iPhone, similar to how I browse a friend’s bookshelf when I happen to visit and then borrow one or two novels to read at home. It takes me a while to commit to buying a book, regardless of format. Pre-Kindle, I would buy in the airports or for book club. Beyond that, I would either have to love the author’s work already, or I’d spend a ridiculous amount of time paging through a copy at the store. But now, because Jason is quick to download books, I feel like I should give them a read before bothering to buy any more. There are plenty of titles that I will skip altogether, but I generally trust his judgment, even if the overlapping section of our Venn diagram of literary preferences is more sunflower than pumpkin seed in shape.

Also, I’m prone to judging a book by its cover. Literally. In a bookstore, I get sucked in by the books on display at the front of the store. Even when I’m looking for children’s books at the library, I’ll pick the ones from the wall that have good illustrations on the jackets. (If I’m alone, I’ll take the time to search for particular authors, but with kids in tow, expediency trumps selectiveness.) Having switched to eBooks, I don’t get prompted by bookstore or library table displays to pick up the latest novel, and I haven’t started reading The New York Review of Books online yet because I barely have time to read the books that we already own (rent?).

Sharing a Kindle account, though, has its downsides. We both have iPhones where we now do most of our reading, and because I at least check out a lot of Jason’s recommendations, we’re often reading the same book at the same time. Every time I open up the Kindle app, I’m asked if I want to sync to the furthest location, which is not mine. Not a problem as long as I stick to the iPhone. When I try to switch back to the Kindle, I can’t sync to my phone, so unless I want to page ahead manually at a deathly slow pace that still manages to aggravate my tendonitis, I’m better off just reading on the phone. One thing that would help is if at the bottom or top of each screen, it indicated the current chapter, so that skipping ahead by chapter from the table of contents didn’t require a guessing game.

I know that I could set up my own Kindle account for my phone, and then we wouldn’t get the conflicting location messages. But we also wouldn’t get to share books easily AND switch between devices — yes, I want it all. I’d have to switch back to the Kindle to read something at the same time that he was, and wouldn’t be able to continue on the phone while waiting in the line at Safeway for the woman in front of me to decide whether or not she wanted that package of full-price ground beef after all. I imagine that I’ll probably get a nook in my stocking this year. And then we’ll have two entirely different systems of reading. Good for this blog, and I’ll take more ownership of my reading list — I will download everything on the Booker shortlist, darn it! But I’ll be a little bit nostalgic too, for the good old days of sharing a Kindle account. It’s kind of like when couples go from sharing a car, suffering the inconvenience of waiting for a ride or schlepping across town to pick up the spouse, to having his and her cars and all of the speed and satisfaction of determining one’s own destiny even if it’s just the best route to take in traffic, and then realizing they kind of miss cruising down the HOV lane together, venting about their day.

In the past, we didn’t share books all that often, but now we discuss what we’re reading pretty regularly, a welcome addition to the short list of Stuff to Talk About Other Than Kids and Work and Mad Men. The lending feature might be reason enough to pre-order the nook. It seems to give us the best of both worlds: a way to share books with each other and read them at the same time… up to two weeks.