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The first thing I notice while when boarding the 13 hour flight from Newark Liberty
International airport to Beijing is the surprising number of Kindles I see sitting in people’s laps: least three in addition to the Kindle 2 I’ve got in my own bag. It’s almost shocking! And just like the Kindle
watchers have stated, it’s not young hipsters with the devices, but middle aged men, all of who appear to be leading tours for high school students or groups of Christian missionaries.
I am traveling with a Kindle 2 that Amazon has generously loaned me to try. I own a Kindle 1, but gave that to my arthritic 72-year-old mother. She loves that she doesn’t have to drive to a bookstore to buy books, as well as that she can make the font bigger. The Kindle 1 as opposed the 2 is also much easier for her to use, with its child-sized buttons.
What surprised me is for all of Amazon’s touting of the number of titles available for the Kindle, I wasn’t able to find a single guidebook I wanted to buy, nor many of the nonfiction books I was hoping to take with me.
I did end up buying Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost, which is very entertaining, but wasn’t able to buy Jung 
Chang’s controversial biography Mao, which is what I really wanted. There’s a double blow to the book: It’s both banned in China and not available for the Kindle.
So, what am I using for a guide? The always reliable Lonely Planet Beijing and DK’s Top Ten Beijing. My favorite guidebooks, Wallpaper’s City Guides, didn’t have an updated edition to the city. The latest available for Beijing was dated from 2007. What gives? I suppose this may have somethign to do with the global economic downturn — what’s the point of updating guidebooks to far-flung destinations when “staycations” are still all the rage.
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