Yesterday I got my shiny new Amazon Kindle!
First up, credit where credit is due, I ordered the Kindle from the Amazon website late Sunday afternoon, and it was in my hands on Tuesday morning. Very impressive, thanks Amazon!
In addition to ordering the Kindle, I also opted to buy the leather case, which includes a built in light (powered from the Kindle battery) to allow reading in the dark.
Here is how it looks:
I opted to go for the standard wifi version, rather than the 3G one. This was for a couple reasons:
- I have heard reports about significant differences in battery life between the two.
- I don’t think I would ever be in a situation where I was somewhere where I “had” to buy a book. I could happily wait to get back to the house/work where I could hook up to the wireless
After powering the device on, I hooked it up to the wireless and made sure that it was registered to me (when you purchase the Kindle, it is automatically registered to the Amazon account that is purchased by, this can be changed though), and it was.
With that in place, I set about trying to get some of my existing eBooks on to the device. The question is, how do you do that? Short answer, easily!!
You can either:
- plug the Kindle into your computer and copy files onto the device
- send an email with the book as an attachment to the Kindles built in email address (you can find this address in the “Manage My Kindle” section of the Amazon website
- purchase a book directly from the Amazon store and “send” it to the device
Because I wanted to see how it would work, I opted to go for the second option. I fired up Outlook, attached the book and sent it. Within a few minutes, the book was on the Kindle, so very clever!! I sent a few eBooks with a couple different formats, namely PDF and mobi, as I wanted to see how both would work. The results are shown here:
They both work very well!!
In fairness, the PDF version is “slightly” harder to read, due to the text size, and the only real way to read it is to turn the display into landscape mode. I am going to play with converting the PDF into another format using something like Calibre to see how that works out, and I will post back to say how well it works.
Next up? Social Networking interaction. Again, simply because I wanted to see how it worked, I set up my Twitter and Facebook account within the Kindle. When reading a book, if you find a passage that is very interesting, you can bookmark it, and once bookmarked, you can share the selected passage on Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t this earlier, and this was the result:
https://kindle.amazon.com/post/2FL7BXE4UXKFD
So, to wrap up, I am VERY happy with the Kindle so far! It does exactly what it says on the tin, and it does it well. I still have to look into reading newspapers and magazines on it, but if it is anything like reading a book, then it should again work very well.
If you don’t have a Kindle, and you do a lot of reading (like I do on the commute to work) I would highly recommend that you get one.
comments powered by Disqus