For my 30th birthday, I got an Amazon Kindle, a device that allows me to carry around hundreds of e-books in what looks like a small leather-bound notebook. At first I was underwhelmed. There is no way, I thought, I'd deprive myself of the feel and smell of a printed book in favour of this electronic item that doesn't even show me the cover art. I like books and I like being surrounded by many of them, and this not-too-sleek thing in my lap (the Kindle team clearly judged ergonomics superior to design) was not what I called a book.

Four months later, my Kindle and I are inseparable. I doubt that new moms topped the target group list of the folks at Amazon who dreamed up this product (though given the ever-growing army of pram-pushing women in the park, why not, it's not that insignificant a group after all), but the Kindle is one of the best things to happen to the reading mother of a newborn (who can afford the $380 product, that is) since nappies.

First of all, the next-page buttons located under my thumb on both sides of the screen make page flipping easy and allow me to read a 500-page book single-handedly.

This may seem like an inferior advantage, unless you spend about three-and-a-half hours a day nursing, one hand permanently occupied with holding your baby. Even if you need to rest, the Kindle on the bed you can keep reading - no pages fluttering in the breeze. Also, whenever I pick up my kindle, it "opens" to the last page I read, something my memory consistently failed to accomplish with paper books. I spend more time reading now than I did before Rada was born, and I have my ever-growing Kindle library to prove it. Admittedly, I was somewhat guilt-ridden when I read that when nursing you should shower your baby with your attention, your touch, your voice.

So I've started reading Amitar Ghosh's Sea of Poppies aloud to little Rada. I don't know if our bonding process is suffering, but she's definitely getting quite a literary head start. And she seems to like it.

When I finish Sea of Poppies, I'll log onto amazon.com and purchase my next novel online for $9.99. Given that my trips to the bookstore are a rarity these days, especially in this baby-unfriendly weather, having access to hundreds of thousands of books at my fingertips is quite valuable. And I no longer mutter obscenities addressed at the Bulgarian postal service each time a package with books fails to reach me.

Finally, since procreation seems to heighten one's concern with the future, I take solace in knowing that in the long run, my e-book will be more environmentally sound that a couple of hundred dead-tree books.

There is a lot more to the Kindle for the universal user, who, if my husband is any indication, might like it just as much as mommy does.