ABOUT three months ago, I had bought a Kindle, an e-book reader from Amazon. It was such a useful device. No more thinking about where to put the new book shelves. With the Kindle, everything is digital.

I wrote in Digital Life about the convenience of owning a Kindle and how it was easy to buy and read the latest best-selling novels the instant they hit the stores.

A retiree, Mr Tang Wee Lip had read about it and was determined to own one. He emailed me to ask about it and how to go about buying it.

Online store Amazon sells the device but only in the US. There are workaround solutions for bookworms here and I shared them with him in my response to his email.

What impressed me in his email which thanked me for the workaround solution was the last line of his message: "I’m 68 years old. I was intrigued.

Seldom do I come across an elderly person who’s so interested in technology. At that age, most of my friends’ parents are complaining about the small font size on their cellphones or how they preferred to read the real thing, a book, instead of going digital.

Well, not only did Mr Tang, a former civil servant and financial consultant, manage to buy a Kindle, he bought the latest model. The Kindle DX sports a 9.7-inch screen, bigger than the original device so that he can enlarge the fonts and read better, he said, when I met him about two weeks ago, to show him how to buy e-books.

“The Kindle also has text-to-speech, it can 'read' to me which is good because my eyes tire when I read too much,” he said as he made me show him step-by-step the task of buying e-books and how to change to a bigger font size on the Kindle DX.

What I discovered in that one-hour meeting with him over coffee at McDonalds in Tanglin Mall was that the Kindle was not the only e-book reader he had. Neither was he a tech newbie.

He already owned the Elonex e-book sold in England which he bought early this year. But he was not happy he could not increase the size of the letters to make it easier on his eyes. Hence, the Kindle DX.

For our meeting, he brought along his netbook, the ultra-portable laptop that has a seven-inch screen and weighs less than a kilogram.

And you know how most PC users tend to use Internet Explorer as their web browser?

Not Mr Tang.

He was toggling between Firefox and IE when we met as IE had refused to launch on his computer. I was surprised his computer was running Firefox, a browser more popular with geeks, but my jaw dropped when I saw he also had Chrome, a new browser from Google which is still undergoing tests.

This is the thing about Mr Tang. He has a redundancy plan. He has an alternative so that, if one fails, he can turn to the other. It's the same reason why he has two other regular-sized laptops at home, "in case one fails", he explained.

His experience has been that often one laptop would hang, which prevented him from going online. So having a second computer allows him to continue with his cyber activities while he fiddles with the "hung" computer to find a solution.

"I just try various options to find a solution to the machine that isn’t working. You’ve to be patient to try various things before you can find one that will work," he advised.

But the laptops are too heavy to carry around with him. Hence, his choice of a netbook which is light and handy enough to slip into a small bag. It lets him check stock prices and his e-mail, not only from his doctor daughter in England, but from friends and fellow retirees here who want to share with him their favourite YouTube videos.

And to make sure he can go online wherever he is, he doesn’t rely on the free wireless hotspots. Instead he subscribed to a mobile "stick", a USB-like device that has a 3G SIM card in it and allows a user to go online anytime, any place.

This mobile "stick" was in his netbook so that I could show him how to buy content online.

E-books are not his only cyber interest. He also downloads news and current affairs podcasts from BBC which he listens to every night.

More senior citizens should be like Mr Tang. He is a model senior citizen when it comes to IT. He bothers to keep himself up to date with technology although computers are not second nature to him like it is with the millenials.  

But he is willing to spend time to learn and to explore new areas like e-books. That surely is a good way to keep remain mentally active and prevent the cobwebs from dimming the brain.