I have pretty much decided to take a little of my tax refund, in a week or two, and treat myself to the $79 entry-level Amazon Kindle.

Anyway, noodling around the Amazon site in wishful anticipation, I decided to try downloading the Kindle app to my smartphone, just to see how it works and so that I’d already have a Kindle account set up. A smartphone screen is not ideal for long-term reading (as I will point out in a newspaper column about the Kindle platform later in the week), but it actually works quite a bit better than I anticipated.

In order to have a book in my new account, I went to the list of public-domain classics available for free download. My choice was a simple one: “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne. One of my favorite books as a child, and one I dearly wish I still had, was a terrific annotated edition of this classic. In the margins of the book, the editors would provide helpful definitions and illustrations of the many places and different types of aquatic life mentioned in the book, and would point out passages in which Verne predicted technology that would not exist until decades after the 1870 novel was published.

Anyway, I hadn’t read the book in years, and it seemed like something I’d enjoy revisiting. I started reading it on the smartphone, just to see how it worked, and I’ve gotten about a third of the way through the book just this evening.

I also downloaded the free sample of my own Bad Self-Published Novel, which is available on Kindle. When I get the device, I’ll probably spring for the actual novel, knowing that I’ll eventually get back some of the purchase price. To my knowledge, even though the novel has been available on Kindle since the get-go, I haven’t sold any Kindle copies of it.