I thought long and hard about buying a Kindle but had some reservations: one being the price of approximately $350 and another was the newness of the product. I decided to wait for the next generation of Kindles. One day I heard an announcement that Kindle 2 was coming out and I knew I had to have it. Here's what it looks like.

The Kindle is about the size I thought it would be--5 inches wide and 8 inches high, about 1/3 of an inch thick and weighs about 10 ounces. The first thing I did was charge it by plugging the power adapter into a wall outlet, but you can charge from your computer by taking the top off the plug and using the USB cable.

It is fully charged in approximately 4 hours. The instruction booklet talked about all the buttons -- power switch, five-way controller (the mouse), home, menu, next page, previous page and back. All buttons were easy to find and use.

My next step was to register it. Here I ran into my first snag: I don't use text messaging, so using the small QWERTY keyboard was a challenge. After a lot of practice, I finally got it registered.

I was ready to download some books. All books, newspapers, magazines and blogs can be downloaded during a 14-day trial period -- a great plus. I discovered that there are over 235,000 books to download -- the average cost for purchasing a book is about $9.99. There are 32 newspapers, 1,300 blogs and 24 magazines available. Prices vary. Also available are free books to download -- many are older classics or ''romance'' novels. Kindle holds over 1,500 books -- it has 2 Gbyte of internal storage (approximately 1.4 Gbytes available for user content).