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I’m Kindled
By Cameron Sorden | May 8, 2008
If you’ll permit me a moment to talk about something other than video games, I need to tell you about my Kindle. I bit the bullet and paid the exorbitant price for one last week, and it came in the mail yesterday. I can already tell, after a single day of playing with it, that this thing has changed my life. It’s utterly amazing. Reading has always been a hobby of mine, but my interest in it shot through the roof with my Kindle.
If you’ve never heard of Kindle before, it’s Amazon.com’s new electronic reading device. Basically, it’s a portable e-book with a bazillion amazing features. For starters, the text on it looks like a book page. It’s not hard to read at all, it won’t strain your eyes, and there’s no backlight, so you treat it just like a book. It fits comfortably in one hand, although you can also hold it with two, and you click buttons to turn pages. It’s capable of storing up to 200 books by itself, and there’s room for an SD memory card so that you can store thousands more.
The coolest part about it is that you can browse the Amazon store from your Kindle and get books delivered wirelessly to the device in under a minute from anywhere. You don’t need to sign in, or deal with credit card stuff, or anything — your Kindle is always signed in as you, and when you make purchases they use your “one-click checkout” info. They just bill your credit card. No hassle, immediate satisfaction. Best of all, the cost of the internet service used to send you books is included in the initial price you pay on the Kindle and the cost of the e-Books. In other words, there’s no monthly fee. You just pay for the books you want (and they’ll send you the first chapter of anything free of charge).
I’m in love with it. I had heard a few negative things about it, like how easy it was to accidentally click your page forward and how the reader would often fall out of the case, but I haven’t had any problems with the former and there’s a great work-around for the latter, although I haven’t experienced any problems with that yet either (you just stick some one-sided adhesive rubber tabs from an art supply store inside the case and they give the Kindle added traction).
The thing is just so damn easy to use and fun to read. In addition to being able to buy and read books from Amazon, you can also load your own files on it, which suddenly makes the entire body of work from Project Gutenberg available to you, to read, free of charge. What’s even better is that I found a website that lets you download those titles pre-formatted for your Kindle. Within the first few hours of getting my Kindle I had twelve titles loaded on it that I’d been meaning to read for a long time, including The Hour of the Dragon (gotta love Conan), the Count of Monte Cristo (a classic), and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (heard great things, read it all last night, I highly recommend it).
It feels natural to read and hold, the text size is adjustable, it saves your place in every book you’re reading (if you’re like me and read several at once that’s really nice), and it can go seemingly forever without needing to be recharged (just turn the wireless feature off when you’re not using it). I love being able to just instantly look up a word I don’t know with the built-in dictionary, or get some background for something on wikipedia (also free of charge and accessible from anywhere). I love carrying around a virtual library of books and magazines in a device as light, small, and unobtrusive as a paperback novel.
I’m also the kind of person where I sometimes feel like reading something new, and nothing I have at the moment appeals to me. Unfortunately, this often happens at 10PM when the library and book store are long since closed– my new solution: pick a book from the hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles, get it delivered wirelessly in under a minute, and go. They have fiction, nonfiction, older titles, and pretty much anything that’s on the best sellers list (usually for a fraction of the cost, too).
If I sound like a Fanboi, it’s because I am. I’m converted. It only took me like 20 minutes of playing with it to absolutely fall in love with it. The only complaint I have about it is that browsing magazines or newspapers is a little weird because of the brevity of their articles, but if you’re settling down to read for a while (or even just a few minutes), it’s amazing. I can’t recommend it enough.
If you enjoy reading, do yourself a favor and buy one. It will change the way you read, permanently.
Topics: Kindle, computer, crack, literature |
May 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
The KINDLE?
Time for a Sony Reader / Amazon Kindle throwdown!
On the other hand, welcome to a portable library
I have 35 books on my Sony Reader.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
My wife and I are dying to get two of these but they’re just too damn expensive. The main reason we want one is because we mostly enjoy late night reading and its such a pain in the ass to hold a book while lying in bed. You always have to lean on one arm until you lose circulation, and its impossible to hold a paperback with one hand without irrecoverably bend the crap out of it like I do.
One question: no backlight? no “indiglo” at least? Because finding enough light to read is another problem for late night reading…
May 8th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Nice to hear! I’ve been close to buying one for a while now. I suppose I should just do it.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I’ve almost bought a Kindle a few times, and now that they’re back in stock it’s especially tempting, but I noticed none of the books I recently ordered were available for the Kindle. I think perhaps I’d be better off waiting anyway just so Amazon can build up their Kindle library.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:54 am
I bought a clip-on light for my Reader.
I’ve come to more or less resent having to read dead tree books. If I bring a real book somewhere, that’s the only book I have. A large book, like Iain M. Banks’ Matter — I can’t bring that ANYWHERE.
I plan on getting my daughter a Reader and sharing books with her that way.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The backlight may or may not be an issue for me. My previous eBook experience was with eReader on my old iPaq PDA. Great application, great fonts, the PDA has ajustable backlighting… just a tiny little screen which Kindle/Sony Reader address. But if I’m reading while commuting to/from work, I’m back to needing a functional overhead light in the plane, which is also distracting to the passengers near me. I don’t think a mildly backlit reader would be as distracting to anyone else other than piquing their curiosity to what I was doing or reading.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I’ll be sold when it can display (color) comic book page scans. I see the new sony one will do B&W manga but I need my full color glossies.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Can you loan books from your e-library to other Kindle users, yet?
May 9th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I’m not sure… they’re saved as .azw files which you could presumably pull off and stick on another Kindle, but I don’t have a second one to test it.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I’ve read color eInk is still several years off, so it looks like B&W readers will be the best we have til then.
I’m also very interested in the formats the Kindle uses. Back in my eReader days, I bought a few (Palm’s DRM was the least evil of the bunch at the time) but I also wrote software to scan through documents and add the Reader formatting code so I could compile them myself. If I were able to do that, I might be sold on the current model Kindle.
I’m not a huge fan of PDF at all but I can live with it if that’s all I have to work with.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Kindle reads multiple formats: AZW, PRC, MOBI, and Plain Text. Additionally, they offer a free conversion service that will turn HTML, DOC (Microsoft Word), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP documents to AZW (or you can just make PRC files yourself with a free MOBI converter).