Getting Frozen Out By My Kindle

I hate to say it, but my new Kindle has been letting me down lately. In the last week, it has frozen three times. Yep. It just sits there and won't respond. Sometimes I'm treated to a blank page, on other occasions the screen saver stares back at me. This is especially frustrating when I am at a good point in the book and the darn page won't turn.

I googled the problem and it seems as though I am not the only reader who has been frozen out by my Kindle. One of Amazon's suggestions is to plug it into its charger for a moment. That won't do me much good when I am on the bus with a frozen Kindle - looking forward to an hour's ride home with nothing to read.

Other advice is to depress the <ALT>, <Shift>, and <R> at the same time. This worked great the first time, although the second two times it took several minutes for the Kindle to reboot. There's also a hard restart that involves removing the back cover and pushing the restart button.

Reading has always been one of life's simple pleasures. I love being transported into another world. But it's hard to leave reality behind when you are constantly wondering whether you'll be able to turn the page. That latent anxiety takes some of the magic out of reading.

And it's not as though Kindles and e-books are inexpensive.

Sure, I still love my Kindle. It's still a cool way to read. But I have to say tree-books never let me down this way.