This is going to be short and sweet.  Being the fond owner of far too many books in glorious 3-D, I had never seen the point of buying an E-book reader.  But my fear of running out of suitable things to read while away from home won out, and I bought a Kindle earlier this week.

What I haven’t done is load it up with stacks of books published in the last few years, though some of you might be tempted. Here are four books I have bought recently, showing what Amazon charges for a downloaded version (the cover price in each case being £7.99).

1. (1)‘The Historian’, by Elizabeth Kostova,  (£4.99)
   

2. (2)‘The Finkler Question’, by Howard Jacobson, (£4.32)
   

3. (3)‘Any Human Heart’, by William Boyd,  (£3.49)
   

4. (4)‘A Fine Balance’, by Rohinton Mistry, (£4.74)
   

Cover price total = £31.96

Amazon total      = £17.54

Price I paid          = £1.00

Yes, I acquired these four books for the grand expenditure of  £1.00 (that’s one pound sterling, folks). That’s because, living here in southern Bucks, I just play potluck with whatever turns up in our abundance of charity shops, and the admirable Shaw Trust  in Princes Risborough had one of it’s BOGOF weeks (that’s ‘Buy one get one free’, for those of you living on Mars), meaning that each paperback, normally priced at a heady 50p, plummeted to 25p when you bought two.

Now, is it actually possible to acquire books for less than 25p each? The answer, surprisingly, is ‘Yes’, when you look up ‘free books for kindle’ on the Amazon web site.

Not, as I’ve suggested, that you will find recently published books for free. What you WILL find is a whole stack of classics.   Here’s a brief selection of free books on my Kindle.

In English:

Well over 30 novels by Jane Austen, all three Brontes, Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Henry James, Mary Shelley, Smollett , Sterne, Thackeray and Trollope.

In French:

Novels or poetry by Balzac, Baudelaire,, la Princesse de Cleves, Constant,  Flaubert, de Laclos, Maupassant, Proust, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Voltaire and Zola.

In German:

Novels or poetry by Fontane, Heine, Kafka, Kleist, Rilke and Storm.

I did give in to the temptation actually to spend some money, I must admit; but it rarely went over the pound mark (though I did lash out £2.86, for 209 short stories by Anton Chekhov).

If you do plan on buying books for your Kindle, it is quite frighteningly easy, though you do need a wireless connection to the web. The simplest way - if you are an existing Amazon customer - is to go to their online store and choose ‘Kindle’. Once you have decided on a title (whether it is free or not) you choose the ‘Buy now with 1-click’ option and the damn thing pops up on your Kindle in less than a minute. (I’ve just tried it out, and the one I’d chosen actually made it in 10 seconds or so).

For reading, you don’t need access to the net.  Ok, it’s not the same as reading a book (I wouldn’t read it in the bath, for example). But it is not an unpleasant experience. The text is clear whether in natural or artificial light; you can change the font size, go for sans serif if you prefer, even rotate the text to read in landscape mode if you prefer.

So, will I stop taking books away with me?  I doubt it, but I will certainly be taking fewer. And with airliners charging you way over the odds for luggage - whether checked in or carried on - that can’t be a bad thing.