It’s Been A Long Time Since I Talked About My Kindle!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted about my Kindle, so here’s a summary of over 7 months experience with it.

Likes:

1. Love the NY Times appearing on it automatically every morning
2. Love being able to buy Kindle books from Amazon so quickly and easily
3. Love all of the free eBooks now available in Kindle format. Between MobileRead and Feedbooks it’s hard not to find what you want in the way of pubic domain books for the device.
4. Love having the entire 51 volume set of Harvard Classics on my Kindle – and yes I’m actually reading them!
5. Did I mention the NY Times….oh yeah, still loving that

Dislikes:

1. Not every Amazon book is available yet in Kindle format. I recently had to buy four “dead tree” books from Amazon since they weren’t available in Kindle format.
2. The Web browser on it is excruciatingly sloooooooooow! But, what the heck, it does give you absolutely free access to the Internet from wherever the Sprint cellular network exist – so I guess that’s something of a quibble

Yes, I love the Kindle, even in it’s first generation form. Of course, I’d love to see improvements to the device, but even as it stands now it is one terrific eBook reader!

Kindle Version Better Than “Real”?

Here’s a great article that explains very well just why I prefer reading the NY Times on my Kindle to reading the paper version. In addition, the very first time my wife read a NY Times article on the Kindle she also said she thought it was a better reading experience than reading the actual newspaper. So I guess we’re all agreed!

Hundreds of Free Kindle Books

If you got a Kindle for Christmas and want to fill it up with lots of books to read at no cost to you, go into the Kindle browser and enter the following URL:

http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide

This will download a Kindle document with links to hundreds of downloadable Kindle books. They are public domain classics and are listed by title, author, and category. In addition this guide contains a link allowing you to download future updated versions of it to your Kindle.

I downloaded Crime and Punishment and a Philo Vance mystery through this guide and they are formatted to perfection for my Kindle. Kindle owners: be sure to check this out!

3 Weeks with a Kindle

Well, it’s been three weeks now that I’ve owned my Kindle and I have to report that I really enjoy reading books on it. It’s so easy to take with me wherever I go and easy to pick up and start reading it whenever I find myself with free time. It’s simply a pleasure to read books on it! In fact, I’ve been able to read much more than I did prior to owning the Kindle. I’ve finished three reading books in three weeks – not bad! I’ve purchased 6 books from Amazon, and created 4 more using the Mobipocket Creator program. I’m also reading the NY Times on it every morning.

What did I do before owning my Kindle?

By the way, someone has already come up with a hack for the Kindle that allows it to read DRM-protected Mobipocket eBooks, so one of the major gripes against Amazon for not supporting this format has effectively vanished.

A Week With The Kindle

Well I’ve had my Kindle for about a week now and here are my impressions, in no particular order:

The NY Times subscription is wonderful. Each day’s paper gets automatically delivered to my Kindle around 5:30 AM EST. It’s really great to be able to read the Times every day again.

My wife, the committed technophobe, likes the Kindle! I passed it to her one day to let her read a NY Times article, and she was really impressed by its small size, light weight, and wonderful screen. I think she may become a Kindle owner sometime next year.

Buying a book from Amazon is an amazingly easy experience. Their current library is very extensive, but of course I want even more books avaiable!

Creating my own Kindle book is very easy. So far I’ve done two – one from Project Gutenberg and one from a university Web site. It’s a breeze to do using the free Mobipocket Creator program and the resulting book on the Kindle is outstanding!

The browser is better than I first thought. I actually used it yesterday at the airport while waiting for my plane (which was late!) to read Mobile Google Reader and the mobile version of Google News. It’s really not bad now that I’ve gotten used to the scrollwheel interface of the Kindle.

I’ve come to prefer reading the Kindle inside its cover. It’s much less likely to accidentally hit a page forward or backward button.

Early Christmas This Year

 

My wife gave me my primary Christmas present early this year: a Kindle! I’ve been playing with it since late last night. I’ve read the entire manual contained within the Kindle, and purchased my first book. I’ve tried the search function, including Wikipedia, and accessed the mobile edition of the Google Reader to try it as an RSS reader.

My first impressions are that it’s simply a wonderful eBook reader, but somewhat lame as a Web browser. It would certainly serve in a pinch, but my Treo 700p is a much better and faster Web browser than the Kindle. So it’s likely I’ll never use my Kindle for accessing Web pages since my Treo is always with me.

I am certainly enjoying it as a book reader, though. Now I’m off to sign up for another Christmas present from my wife: a Kindle subscription to the New York Times!

OK, I’m Not Buying One – But I’m Getting A Kindle for Christmas!

My wife has now officially informed me that she’s buying me a Kindle for Christmas along with a Kindle subscription to the NY Times. Since my lovely wife is giving it to me as a gift the Kindle has now instantly transformed into a truly wonderful device!

Actually the electronic NY Times subscription is something I’m really looking forward to receiving. We used to get home delivery of the Times when we lived in NJ, and since moving to WV a little over 3 years ago I must admit to missing it. The Charleston Gazette is a wonderful little paper full of good cheer and stories on local events, and I really love reading it, but the NY Times is a really meaty paper with wonderful in-depth stories of great import. I’m looking forward to having the chance to read it again every day.

In addition my wife gave me a really good reason for owning a Kindle: I’ll no longer have to take pains in deciding which books I’m willing to carry in my luggage for reading on my business travels. The Kindle is actually going save me some packing weight – which is very nice thing, indeed!

Why I’m Not Buying A Kindle

It seems as though everyone in the blogsphere is buying a Kindle. I’m not, at least until someone can tell me why I’d want to spend $400 on an additional device I’ll have to carry to read eBooks.

Now, first of all I’m a big eBook reader and have been for many years. Today, I read eBooks on my Kohjinsha SH6 UMPC or my Treo. In fact, I actually read most eBooks on my Treo because I always have it with me. It’s always in my pocket and whenever I have time to kill I can pull it out and get some reading done.

My eBook reading is done using eReader on both Treo and UMPC. Even eReader DRM’ed books can be read on both devices. When I used my N800, I used the freeware FBReader on it. It’s worked great and supported a ton of formats. Now that I’ve retired the N800, I’m quite happy with eReader. I even have the eReader Studio program for creating nicely formatted eReader books from a wide variety of other formats, including Word.

My first problem with the Kindle – unlike freeware eBook readers like FBReader, the Kindle can only read Kindle DRM’ed books, text, non-DRM’ed Mobipocket, and non-DRM’ed Palm OS .prc files. Kindle format files are locked to the device. You can’t even transfer files from one Kindle to another, even if you delete them from the original Kindle. If it’s going to cost me $400 it better do more than that!

It’s big enough so that to carry it I’d really need a shoulder bag. If I’m going to carry a shoulder bag, then I’m going to be carrying my Kohjinsha SH6 in it, not another device. I just retired my N800 because I don’t want to have to carry extra devices with me. The Treo is my bread and butter, with me all the time, pocketable computer. Any time I require more heavy lifting in the computing arena, the SH6 and it’s mega-external battery gets packed up into the Walmart DVD player shoulder bag I use to carry it. I’d have to buy a bigger bag to carry a Kindle as well!

The one big benefit I see in Amazon’s Kindle initiative is that they have brought down the price of eBooks. This new pricing can only benefit everyone as their eBook competitors will be forced to match them.