Amazon Kindle
I am debating whether or not to buy an Amazon Kindle.
There is a thorough review over at Pajamas Media that may just sway me to purchase one. The price is a bit too high for my taste but my house is overflowing with books and the extra closets and bookshelves that I need to hold them all is much more costly than this device. If anyone has experience with the Kindle, let me know what you think and whether it is worth getting.
There is a thorough review over at Pajamas Media that may just sway me to purchase one. The price is a bit too high for my taste but my house is overflowing with books and the extra closets and bookshelves that I need to hold them all is much more costly than this device. If anyone has experience with the Kindle, let me know what you think and whether it is worth getting.
posted by Helen at 7:41 AM
16 Comments:
Dr Helen- please was it a bit before you r plunk your hard earned cash down. My friend got one about 10 days back,and it has already failed. Seems the power supply died. Wait till they work the kinks out of the first production run.
I did buy an iPod Nano within days of Glenn reviewing it . It was from the first production run,and the Nano failed within a week. Apple replaced it after about a month,and the Nano from the later production run has been working fine.
Danny,
Thanks for the suggestion. I have waited a while, they came out six months ago and I thought that by now they might be okay. Sorry that your friend's didn't work out.
I recommend waiting a bit. The new technology is sure to reduce in price over time. Again, how will you store the books you read on Kindle?
NJartist,
The Kindle holds hundreds or thousands of books in memory. Also, there's some way with Amazon to back the books up--not sure how.
I'd love to get a kindle. I love how compact and light it is and how many books it can hold. My problem is that the books you download can't be read by anyone else when you are done with them. If I downloaded a good book and wanted my fiancee to read it she would have to buy the book again at full price.
In order to overcome that limitation, the books will have to become much cheaper. They're already cheaper than physical books, but I won't buy one until the price is at most a quarter that of a paperback that I can lend to someone else.
Amazon should adopt a system like iTunes where your music can be played on multiple authorized machines. That way, I and my fiancee could each get a kindle and share the same pool of books. Just like a bookshelf.
The Kindle is linked to your amazon.com account. Download a book and Amazon remembers that you bought it and then you can download it as many times as you want thereafter.
There is a memory card slot if you want to store more books than the internal memory can hold.
I like my Kindle. It has frozen on me a couple times while surfing the web, but Amazon lists that functionality as "experimental" so I'm not expecting that to be perfect.
There are a couple things that I wish were better. Images don't show up very well; the old-fashioned kind of books are way better for that. Also, I've noticed that the Kindle slows down my reading speed a little bit. The screen can't hold as much text as a book page, even at the smallest font size, and it takes a noticeable fraction of a second to turn the page. I read at a rather fast rate, though (about 120 trade paperback sized pages per hour), so if you don't read quite that fast, the page turning time will probably not bother you.
Ann Althouse bought one a few months back; she blogged about it then. Perhaps it might be worth e-mailing her about how it's worked out for her?
I love my Kindle. I don't just get Kindle books for it--Baen Webscriptions sells science fiction e-books that the Kindle can display (plus they have a bunch of free ones you can download) and Fictionwise even has a document I loaded onto my Kindle that has links to a lot of the free Gutenberg project e-books so I can download them whenever I want.
If you want books you can share, the Baen Webscription e-books have no DRM so you can pass your copy on to a friend when you're done with it.
I used the Kindle to annotate a manuscript (I mailed the Word Doc to my free.kindle.com address and got the converted file back in minutes, and loaded it on the Kindle via the USB cord as a simple drag-and-drop operation, though I could have had it loaded on the Kindle via the wireless for 10 cents) for a friend and being able to search and write notes in the margins was really handy.
I get the New York Times Latest News blog--it's about 2$ a month, and a lot more convenient than trying to use the Kindle's web browser (or even my Mac's web browser) to get the same amount of news off the net.
Being able to download samples takes a lot of the nailbiting out of such Amazon books as I do buy for it.
I live in New Market--if you're interested we could arrange to meet someplace and you could try out the Kindle for yourself. Though Amazon has a 30 day return policy, so the risk in ordering one is fairly minimal.
Hi Catherine,
Thanks so much for your review--it is good to hear that it works so well for you. It sounds like there's no downside to ordering it since I can return it if it doesn't work for me.
Awesome.
- Always connected to cell network (no monthly $)
- Books average 1/3 to 1/2 of retail price
- Very readable. The form factor is great. It’s very light.
- You can put your own docs on there (supports a bunch of formats, pdf support for instance is “experimental” but really good.) by emailing them to yourself. You get charged $0.10 for doing that. I’ve only done it once.
- Things that are in public domain are usually $0.99. If you can get to something on Project Gutenberg, you can just send it to yourself.
- I’ve got a newspaper subscription (IBD) and it’s pretty slick. Full text of articles but not much in the way of charts and graphs.
- You can highlight passages and add notes to them. All of your highlighted blocks and notes are stored in a text file that you can either read on the kindle or just xfer over usb. (I’ve only connected it to the computer 3 or 4 times. It’s totally unnecessary.)
- Battery lasts several days of relatively intense usage (I frequently turn off the wireless access, since I rarely use it. Saves some battery.
I'm very impressed with it and would not hesitate to recommend it. yes it's "first gen" technology, but it's already paid for itself in the savings on book prices.
A couple other things worth noting:
- It does decrease my reading speed a bit, but I read extremely fast and friends with a kindle think I'm a nut job for saying so.
- The "linear" nature of the device does make using it with reference material a little obtuse. I have a few programming books on there and while I find it easier to read them, it's much more difficult to go back and find things easily. I can't really count that against the thing, but it's worth noting.
Are any of your own books listed with Kindle? I was looking at movies on Amazon a couple of weeks ago and I noticed one where buying the download was more expensive than buying the DVD.
One of my husband's best friends has a Kindle. He said he'd give it a 6 out of 10 and advised that it would be better to wait for a new version to come out. He feels that content is lacking, the design could be better, and it is too easy to accidentally hit the "Next Page" button.
I heard that you can't load .txt files into a Kindle. Is that true?
An iPhone is close in cost to a Kindle. The advantage is the Kindle has a bigger screen, but then it does not fit in your pocket. Screen resolution is improving all the time, so soon an equivalent to a printed page should be available (1200 dpi).
I have over 600 books on my Kindle memory card, and love this device tremendously. It's really great. Many of my books were totall free as out-of-copyright offered by Gutenberg and many other sources. I love being able to get books from the Kindle store as "Samples" since often that's all I need to read, and boy -- does it save gasoline cost for driving to a bookstore. I also have stored many of my PDFs on it and they come out really good. I did attach my Kindle to it's case using velcro, which makes it much safer against dropping. I carry it with me everywhere I go, so I can take advantage of time which would otherwise be wasted. Now Amazon has dropped the price 10% to $359.00 and with a 30 day return policy and free 2 day ship, plus ebooks being much cheaper than dead tree books, how can you go wrong. Charles Wilkes
視訊做愛視訊美女無碼A片情色影劇kyo成人動漫tt1069同志交友網ut同志交友網微風成人論壇6k聊天室日本 avdvd 介紹免費觀賞UT視訊美女交友..........................
Post a Comment
<< Home