Prime Reading

I sometimes joke with my wife about the dependency that we have on Amazon, and how things might look if Bezos is successful at making Amazon the entire economy. A while back I saw a meme or Tweet that read something like “Hello Prime Citizen, enjoy your Prime Life in your new Prime House with your wonderful Prime Wife,” et cetera, et cetera. We’ve been conflicted for years about the convenience of Amazon versus their less than ideal business practices and seemingly negative effect on local businesses. Still, there is no denying their domination over so many factors in our life.

We’ve had a Prime membership for several years, although we let it lapse for a while last year while trying to reduce the impulse buying. I turned it back on a by accident a while back and decided not to fight it. We’ve got a FireTV, so the free movies and shows are good, and when I discovered Amazon Music, well there was another reason to stay. We even wound up getting an Echo earlier this summer, and have come to use it so much that I’ve thought about getting more. Elder has had a Kids Kindle for a while, and the FreeTime subscription has tons of stuff for it that she loves, although the device is very old and barely usable. I’m looking at getting her an upgraded one for her birthday next month.

I’ve been using an iPad mini to read before bed, but it’s an original. It’s still running an ancient version of IOS from when Apple forced the other web browsers to use Safari’s engine under the hood. Since the device won’t update, I run into a lot of web page rendering issues, which has reduced its effectiveness. And while I’d been using the built in Books app to read my PDFs, getting them on there is a bit of a chore, and I’d been trying to find ways to streamline it.

Enter the Kindle app.

I figured it out, quite by accident, when I was trying to figure out how to get some dowloaded ebooks onto the device. Apple won’t display them at all, but then I figured out that I could Send To Kindle from my computer, and I’ve been in a bit of a frenzy lately. And I’ve discovered that there is also a Prime Reading section of the store where it appears that I have free access to lots of books. Some of them are garbage, but I’ve found a few gems in there.

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