Amazon’s e-book reader – the Kindle – is, at least in my opinion, very close to the perfect product. Certainly, as someone who reads a lot I must be fairly close to the Amazon marketing men’s target customer. Typically, I expect to read an absolute minimum of a book a week – and it’s quite common for me to have one novel, one non-fiction and a number of reference books under scrutiny at any one time.

I don’t think that’s so uncommon, otherwise traditional print books wouldn’t sell so well, but it does mean that I can spend quite a bit of money on books. Over and above the financial side of things the space taken up by my collection of books can soon become quite large. Every so often, I go through the assorted volumes and, putting the reference books and any particular favourites to one side, have a clear out. Normally the books find their way to friends, relatives or charity shops.

Fairly recently, before a house move, I got rid of around fifty books. When I saw them collected together, packed and ready to go, I realised that I had spent something between $500 and $1000 on books in less than a year.

The Amazon Kindle is a fairly high ticket item itself of course, but the downloadable e-books on the Kindle webiste are generally a fair bit less expensive that the conventional printed equivalent. That’s only to be expected. After all, there are no printing or distribution costs and Amazon doesn’t incur any postal charges. Even a saving of just a few dollars per book – which seems perfectly achievable – would mean that anyone who reads on a regular basis could pretty quickly offset the price of the device and then start to actually save money.

There are other benefits apart from the finacial considerations. The Kindle 2 can store about 1500 e-books in its memory, the DX has capacity for 3500. That’s a small library – and a lot of physical storage space freed up in your office or home.

The Kindle is also more environmentally friendly as it saves on paper, chemicals, water and CO2 emissions due to distribution are considerably reduced.

The actual benefits achieved will vary from user to user and will probably depend chiefly on how many books are bought per annum. However, for keen readers, it does seem as if the Kindle can offer a number of different advantages which should justify the initial purchase price.

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and find out how to save money by getting free Kindle books.