Kindle 2 My wonderful wife gave me a Kindle 2 as a gift earlier this year. This is probably the leading wireless reading device available today. It has spawned a number of competitor products.
As an avid book reader (2-3 books/week, more on vacations!) I've enjoyed the financial savings, the format, the convenience (get a new book in less than a minute), and overall experience.
Let me give some more details on my observations.
The format is sleek and easy to handle, even for long reading stretches. (1500 book capacity -- amazing!) You definitely want to get a case, though. That makes it a little easier to hold and protects the screen surface when you're carrying it in a bag. Battery life is terrific. I read it for hours every day on an 8 day trip and used up maybe half the battery.
The basic functions are easy to learn. I think there's a lot more, but I haven't gotten back to the manual to figure it all out.
A surprising % of the books I'm interested in are available in Kindle format. You have to buy books via Amazon; you can't get them from other sources. Most of the books are $5-12 less expensive in Kindle format, so at the rate I'm reading books, I'll cover the initial outlay in savings.
I've had no problems at all with the purchase or download process. The wireless signal has been available everywhere I could get a cell phone signal in the US. (I haven't traveled outside the US with my Kindle yet.)
There's no backlighting or color. I haven't found this to be a problem, myself. But cookbooks, art books, some travel guides might not work as well. If you like to read books in bed at night, you can attach a little book light.
I tried reading the Wall Street Journal for about 2 weeks, but abandoned that. The Kindle (at least in this size) is not a good tool for fast eyeballing of articles and charts on the newprint pages. It was certainly nice to have the daily edition of the WSJ already downloaded to the Kindle early in the morning.
I have read 28 books now on the Kindle. Just as with paper books, I'm reading several at a time. The Kindle "remembers" where I was when I moved from one book to another, so it's easy to jump right back and pick up reading again where I left off. On my recent vacation I took along my Kindle loaded up with books, a small notebook for writing, and my Bible. That's about 20 pounds less than the paper copies of all the books I read on that trip!
You can highlight text and leave bookmarks in key pages of books, to make it easier to find information. But I do miss being able to mark up books and add scribbles in the margins. I need to experiment more with the Kindle annotation features.
The worst thing right now is that I have no way to pass a book along to someone else. (I've historically enjoyed passing along great books, with my annotations, to friends and colleagues.) Someday maybe the digital rights management tools will be in place to enable this.
I haven't used the Kindle for downloading blogs and other web-based content, so I can't comment on how well that works.
Do I think you should get one? If you're an avid reader in the right circumstances, the Kindle might be good for you. If you only read occasionally, you're probably better off with physical books.
Thoughts? Questions? I'm interested to hear what you think, so comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment