Amazon Books and Kindle.

I have a special way of saving towards stuff I want but can´t afford to buy outright. Since I live in Spain and have euros as currency, and since Spain is quite a popular tourist area for other EU nations, we often get euros which are not Spanish. Every few days I go through my purse and remove the "foreign" euros(most often German, Irish, French, Italian, Potuguese) and pop them in my money savings box.

A couple of months ago I finally had enough to buy a much longed-for eBook. I chose, after carefully scrutinising lots of different sales PR, Amazon´s Kindle. I must say, I´m very pleased with it and it´s cetainly one purchase I don´t regret a bit.At the same time, I do love real books and hope they never go out of commission. I remember from my childhood the special smell of the book stacks in my local Birmingham Public Library and I revel in browsing in book shops. But an eBook is brilliant in many ways.

Mine has a really long battery life before you need to recharge. I bought the 3G model (more expensive but in my view worth every penny), which works on the same sort of technology as mobile phones and when the wireless connection is activated I can access Amazon´s bookstore and order books which are in the Kindle almost immediately. With an ordinary non-3G model you would need to be near a WiFi hotspot to do this.

A member of the Writers´Circle I belong to has a Kindle. He went on the Trans Siberian railway last summer. Somewhere in the Steppes, he fancied reading a particular book, looked it up on Amazon and was able to read it within a few minutes. I find this quite gobsmacking. Not that I plan a trip so far away but my Kindle has come in very useful in the last few months of Hubby´s Broken Hip. I´ve had to sit in doctor´s waiting rooms, hospital clinics and now at the physiotherapist´s for ages. Of course you can take a real book with you but I would point out that Ken Follet´s "Pillars of the Earth" is a whopper to cram into a handbag, whereas the Kindle can hold hundreds of books and is both slim and light.

So long live my lovely Kindle with its pink cover (optional extra!). My next target for saved foreign euros will probably be a small laptop - I think they´re called netbooks.