Amazon Kindle

The Amazon Kindle book reader is a great tool for kids and can even encourage reluctant readers to get reading.

I now have a Kindle Fire and absolutely adore it but the original Kindles are not too expensive these days and are perfect for children from the age of about ten up.

There's now a huge variety of children's books available for the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers and kids are often more open to the idea of getting started on a book if they have the option of reading it on one of these devices.

This was certainly the case with my three kids.

My husband and I bought each other an Amazon Kindle for Christmas last year and were so keen on them that we ended up buying one each for our two sons. Our daughter already had an i-pad and has been reading books on it for a while now so I suspected that e-book readers would be popular with the boys too.

I have to be honest and say that the boys didn't go back to reading voraciously as they did when they were small. They were in their final year of high school at the time and had a lot of school work on their plates so they didn't have a great deal of time for reading.

That said, they were keen on their Kindles and definitely read more after they got them.

So, if you're keen to encourage your kids to read, you may like to consider buying them an Amazon Kindle e-reader or one of the many other e-book readers now available.

So which e-reader should you buy? Here's my story.

Buying e-Book Readers

I'd been talking about buying an e-reader for a while but was putting it off because it all seemed so complicated. I knew I'd have to spend some time reading up on how it all worked and I didn't feel up to tackling anything so new and potentially confusing.

Buzzing around in my brain were questions like:

• what brand should I buy?
• where would I get the books from, how much were they and how would I download them?
• is one brand better than another for Australian readers? (I'd heard that it was but couldn't remember which one!)

It all seemed too hard!

In the end, we went with the Amazon Kindle mainly because it seemed the easiest option in terms of buying books. We already had an Amazon account and obviously they have a great range of books. 

Benefits of the Amazon Kindle

Now we have the Kindles, we're blown away with how easy it is to buy and download books. It's also often cheaper - sometimes much cheaper to buy an e-book than to buy a paperback and, of course, the big thing is that you have the book in your hands, ready to read, immediately.

Another benefit of an e-reader is that it takes up less space than a book shelf full of books. This is a biggie for me because we have a small house and our bookshelves are already crammed to overflowing. We simply don't have room for any more books in our house!

Other benefits of the Amazon Kindle include:

• it fits easily into a handbag or a small travel bag so you need never be without something to read wherever you are;


• if you have more than one device linked to your Amazon account, each book you buy appears on every device, allowing more than one family member to read the same book simultaneously;


• older books which are not subject to copyright can be downloaded for free or at a very nominal charge. My daughter is reading George Orwell's Animal Farm for school and I downloaded a copy onto my Kindle for 99 cents so she's reading it on her ipad;


• the Kindle is brilliant for travelling! Download books for your kids to read, for yourself and/or books to read aloud to your children;