You can bookmark a page, highlight a selection of text, type notes or look up words in the dictionary as you read. The Kindle also has several functions that you may find helpful while reading. And if you decide you want something completely different midway through your travels (as long as you're traveling in the United States or a country in which Amazon offers service for its international Kindle), you can always use the Kindle to access Amazon's store and buy a new book. A single Kindle can hold more than enough titles to tide you over. With a Kindle, you don't have to worry about packing heavy books in your luggage to keep you occupied for your whole trip. That memory capacity also makes Kindle readers very convenient for travelers. Amazon offers free online storage for all of its content, so you may have a backup plan if you somehow run out of space.

Today's models do not have card slots, but you can get the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Oasis configured with up to 32GB storage. The original Kindle had a port that allowed users to save titles to a memory card, extending the device's capacity, but then again it only had 250MB of RAM built in. Although there's no standard size for e-books, it's safe to say that that 8GB is enough memory to hold thousands of titles. The $90 Kindle, Amazon's base model, comes with 8GB of storage.

Why would you want to use an e-book reader in the first place? One reason is that a single e-book reader can hold many titles.

These factors give the Kindle a leg up on the competition. Amazon also has a large customer base, which means a big audience for e-books - and lots of publishers and self-published authors wanting to jump into that market. You can buy a book or subscribe to an electronic version of a newspaper on Amazon and download it directly to the Kindle. Because Kindles are wireless, you can access the store without connecting the device to a computer.

How to use a kindle e reader