When Dave asked me what I’d like for my birthday this year, I immediately responded: “A Kindle
I’d been working on some new projects and amassed a bundle of chunky text books as part of my research. Every time we left the house, I was bringing the lot with me – just in case there was some down time while we were out. The idea of having all my texts and annotations in a single 241g bundle was vastly appealing.
Note for Irish readers: the Kindle is not available for sale to Ireland via amazon.co.uk – we’re supposed to order from amazon.com, then buy the UK power adapter as an extra, and pay international shipping and duty on the lot. If you are blessed, as Dave is, with an obliging UK-based friend or relative, use their address for shipping!
eInk
When the goods arrived, I broke into the packaging, hauled out the goods, and started trying to peel the “How to get started” sticker off the screen. Doh! That weren’t no sticker – that was eInk – yowza! Impressive! Text is as legible as normal print in all levels of light, though the screen is shades of grey on grey, rather than crisp black on white, which takes a small bit of getting used to.
Content
You can download free and paid Kindle-specific content from amazon (again, Irish users are directed to the .com site where the selection is restricted for international customers). You can usually (always?) download the first chapter free to see if you fancy spending your hard earned cash on the full book. You can also drag-and-drop content in a variety of supported formats to the device.
I got the WiFi only version, but with 3G, this toy would have been an amazing thing to have back in my pre-kiddie days when I travelled a bit and always wound up for English reading material just before the end of my trip, having lugged around several kilos of paper for the duration. It has a web browser too, so you can catch up on news and blogs if you’re not in the mood for a whole novel.
Readability
Content that can re-flow on the 6″ screen is very easy to read and enjoy – PDFs somewhat less so: original page size, fonts, layout, whitespace etc. are preserved, which means you may have to zoom in to get to a legible font size, and then scan left and right, and up and down on every page. Since battery power on the Kindle is used up by screen re-draws, this is a pretty unpleasant and inefficient way to read. You can email a PDF to your personal Kindle address with a subject line of “Convert” and amazon will convert it and make it availble for download to the device. Good for documents that don’t rely on their layout to make sense (no use for reading tables of statistics). If you’re going to avail of the conversion service, add yourself to your safe senders list first on the “Manage Your Kindle” page on amazon first!
There’s also an experimental text to speech facility, which seemed pretty nifty. The voices didn’t sound too computer-y at all, though I can’t imagine them reading a whole entire book to me – I think I’d opt for content from audible or similar if I was after that kind of service.
Syncing
Syncing your latest position in a text across multiple platforms is great – I can pick up where I left off on the Kindle, the iPhone, my laptop or the iPad. This only works for content downloaded from the Kindle store, as far as I can tell thus far, though.
And there’s more…
It’s taken me weeks to get as far as posting this introductory review, because every time I try to be definitive about something the Kindle does/doesn’t do, I find myself discovering new features and services and wasting time trying them out. So, I’m going to go ahead and post the brief details above: if I discover any particular useful features worthy of mention, they’ll get a separate post another time.
In short:
Would I recommend it? Yes. Buy a cover while you’re at it – mine arrived this morning and I’m no longer afraid to stick it in my handbag for fear of the screen getting scratched.
