eBooks and a new Kindle
I was given a free Amazon Kindle for attending a sales event a little while ago. I’ve always been currious about them but never willing to shell out the money to buy one. I’ve been reading on it for a few weeks now and I must say that I am very impressed. The kindle is really a one trick pony but it does that one trick very well. The screen looks just like reading a book and my eyes do not get tired like they do reading on a computer. I just finished reading a behemoth of a book on it (alternating between the audio book on my drive and the Kindle when not mobile). I love it for reading books and articles. I have discovered that reference type books (Music reviews, Computer Books, etc) do not work well for me on the device. I think that is because I tend to flip back and forth and generally move around a lot when reading those types of books.
Likes:
- Natural reading experience. Does not feel any different to my eyes than a paper book.
- Super light weight (I bought a case for it with a LED light and it still weighs less than your average paper back).
- Easy to setup and get books on it via a USB cable.
Could be better:
- eBook organization on the device – Wish it would read a folder structure and make a collection out of that. Instead if I put books in a folder on the kindle via the USB cable, they show up flat on the device. I was able to solve this by using this great piece of beta software called the Kindle Collection Manager but it should be native on the device.
- Wish the number keys were not via an on screen keyboard. Would be much better with physical keys given the amount of time you go to a numeric position in the text.
I have loaded the kindle with a bunch of public domain books and daily newspapers as well as novels. The management was quickly getting out of hand until I discovered Calibre which is an amazing tool. I equate it to iTunes for eBooks. It will download meta data, cover art and social ratings for anything you throw at it. It runs on Mac, Linux and Windows as well.
I am pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoy reading a book on the Kindle and this is coming from someone who was married in the Portland Central Library and has one room in the house dedicated to physical books. I will not replace books 100% with the Kindle like I have done with an iPod vs CD’s but I will take it traveling instead of a stack of books.