Aging In Place Wednesday

Each Wednesday, Laurie Orlov, tech industry veteran, writer, speaker, elder care advocate and Faculty Advisor for the Aging in Place Technology Department at Computer School for Seniors will be sharing her insightful research on how seniors can safely and successfully live independent lives in the home of their choice.

Amazon, Kindle, boomers and seniors -- they get it

A few months ago, on his Post on this Blog, David Berry talked about his new Kindle and how happy he was with it.

So it's not the first time I have had the Kindle presented as a technology for seniors -- in a recent overview I did for a senior center, one of the attendees observed that I had left the product out. Two days ago as I walked past two elderly individuals seated on motorized scooters in the back of an ampitheater in Chautauqua NY, a family member poked me as we walked by -- they were listening to music side-by-side AND reading books on their Kindles -- which they might have learned about at the Amazon product forum for seniors. I think they were friends.

Kindle is a device for downloading books -- up to 1500 of them. It's not cheap -- at $299 -- or upwards of $359 and beyond for latest models. And you have to purchase the downloaded access to 300,000 books and newspapers from the Kindle store. You can search the web as well as the choices of books -- the book print can be enlarged and resized on the reader's screen and Amazon is experimenting with other features, including reading the book out loud and transferring MP3 files to serve as background music while you read.

Most books are $9.99 to download. From CNET: "While it's still short of perfection--and has a price tag that's too high--the Amazon Kindle 2 offers a range of improvements that makes it the best overall e-book reader we've seen to date." There are plenty of naysayers -- especially book publishing industry -- but also technology wonks who can't seem to understand Amazon's 24% year-over-year growth of Kindle sales in this horrendous retail economy. But maybe they're under 50 -- turns out buyers of the Kindle are over 50. And 27% of them are over 60.
So let's see. Ability to store 1500 books, surf the web, buy the book for less than the bookstore price, not have to carry around a bunch of books (library or otherwise), ability to resize the print size. And we're talking about the age segment with the greatest wealth and discretionary spending capability. And who knows -- call me crazy -- maybe that age segment even reads more books.

For more information, visit Laurie at http://www.ageinplacetech.com/ and at the Aging in Place Technology Department at http://www.cs4seniors.com/