Amazon's Kindle

[BenBurch]

I researched the Kindle and the Sony, and picked the Kindle. After two weeks, I ordered another one and gave it to my son, who serves on a submarine and has enough personal space allotted to him to ALMOST hold his spare uniform. I preloaded about 15 books I thought he would like (this was his birthday/Christmas/everything gift for the next two years!!). He received it a few days before deployment, and had several shipmates order one.

Which leads to one of the reasons I love it. I travel a bit on business, and found it cumbersome to carry 3-4 books with me. I frequently ran out of stuff to read, and would find a bookstore and buy things there. This is not an easy thing to do in small rural towns, and the airport bookstores have poor selections. Now, I always have a dozen books with me. It will never replace my paper library, but that was not my intention.

I like the selection on Amazon, and I expect it to improve. For every Kindle book I buy, I also end up ordering a few real books. I like the wireless delivery. The internet browsing is a bit slow, but that's not why I got the thing. I carry it with me everywhere, so I am never stuck in a doctor's office with crappy magazines.

Charts and graphs are a bit difficult to read. Even when I make the font the maximum size (I have poor visions), the charts remain the same, so I would not recommend buying the Kindle version of a book that has tables and charts unless you have excellent eyes.

With an SD card, the Kindle will hold (about?) 200 books. However, everything you have purchased on Amazon stays permanently under your account, and you can reload it at a future date if you run out of room, or screw up your ram.



This is not quite true. It IS keyed to one device, but if you damage the device and get a replacement, you simply register the new one under your account and delete the old Kindle. And then you re-download the books you want to read, either wirelessly or via a cable, at no additional cost. Different than iTunes, for instance, where if you lost your music they don't let you get another copy without paying for it.

True, but if you lose your iTunes you have only yourself to blame as it will prompt you to back them up to a DVD every time you buy...

 

[Sasha]

Thanks, GG, that was really helpful. I had wondered what happens if you fill it up and figured there was some sort of plan in place for that. I also read a little more about it and evidently you can also buy other e-books that aren't sold on Amazon and download them. Guess I'll start hinting to my daughter for Christmas.

 

[The Whether Man]

I've wanted an e-book reading device for a couple of years now and the Kindle looked really appealing. The biggest problem that I can see is that I live in New Zealand, and the Kindle is not available outside of the US of A.

Also, the pdf capability is still in development, and as most of my documents are in this format I really want a reader that can handle these easily.

So I'm still looking . . .