So, first I'll say I love the Kindle overall. I am an avid reader and this device will certainly lighten my load. I am often in the middle of up to 3 or 4 books at one time and having the Kindle makes it easier to manage these, especially when traveling, than carrying a bunch of heavy books around. The Amazon Kindle store (at least for U.S. customers) now has over 400,000 titles available for download, many of them for $9.99 or less. Because the Kindle is an expensive device, some complain that e-books often cost $9.99 (many academic books cost much more than this, and a few e-books actually cost more than their hard-copy counterparts), but I don't mind the price really, since the cost is generally much less expensive than a hard copy. Also, there are hundreds (likely even thousands) of public-domain books whose copyright has worn off that are available for free from Amazon, feedbooks.com, or other sources. In fact, the first books I downloaded were Little Women, Pride & Prejudice, and The Picture of Dorian Gray - all old favorites and all of which were free.
The Kindle is also convenient for reading blogs. I have already signed up for KindleNation and I Love My Kindle, 2 Amazon blogs that post stories about Kindle updates, technology, and free books as they become available. I have also subscribed to a NYTimes blog feed, which publishes certain stories (several per day) as they become available. This is a cheaper option than subscribing to the whole paper, and I get lots of good news stories this way. Blogs are not free on the Kindle, which is strange since they are free to access on the web, but at only .99 to $1.99 per month, they are very cheap and well worth the "push" to my Kindle as each new entry is posted.
Newspapers and magazines can also be accessed through the Kindle, but I have not used this feature, mainly because it is quite expensive and this same content is generally accessed for free through the web. Some newspapers (including WSJ) are actually more expensive on Kindle than in paper form delivered to your front door. This I cannot understand, much less explain, but I definitely don't see the value in that unless you commute on a train and like to read the paper each morning on your commute. I have talked to a friend who also received a Kindle for Christmas, though, and he assures me that the formatting for newspapers is quite good and very easy to use, listing articles in a way that makes sense and forgoing graphics.
I am a grad student and need to read many articles, generally in pdf format. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to stop wasting all that paper printing off hundreds of pages of articles to instead read them on my kindle. So, since kindle does say there's pdf support, I tried this. I simply plugged in the kindle and transferred my articles to the documents folder. This turned out to not be too useful, since in the pdf format you aren't able to increase the font size, and the articles were much too tiny to read comfortably, even with my good vision. Also, you can't highlight or make notes on pdf files on the kindle. So, this sucks, right?
Wrong. There's a workaround. I did a little googling and discovered that I could very easily take my pdfs and convert them to Mobipocket files (the file format kindle uses for e-books) and then the kindle would treat this content just like any other - restoring the ability to change font size (not so important anymore since it's a normal size like any other e-book), and more importantly, highlight and take notes within the text. So this feature is definitely one of the most exciting for me, and likely anyone else who needs to keep up with articles in any kind of journal on a regular basis. And, it's so easy! The conversion process literally takes just a couple of clicks, and then transferring the Mobi file over to the kindle. Very simple, and quick.
Although I love my Kindle and have used it often since receiving it (I opened it a week or so before Christmas and have been using it now for about 2 weeks), but I have a couple of gripes, of course, so I'll discuss those too.
First, the Kindle 2 does not come packaged with a cover, as the first edition did. Why this was omitted for the new version, I don't know...but I think it's a bad move. I went ahead and purchased an M-Edge cover for mine, and I like it, but I don't think I should have had to shell out another $25.00 on a cover for a device that used to ship with one.
Second, and much more annoying, is the fact that there is no way to organize your content via some kind of folder structure. So at this point I only have about 20 books and articles and blogs and whatnot, but eventually I expect to have hundreds. With no folder structure to organize them I foresee a huge pain in the ass trying to find things. Huge.
All in all, a fantastic device and one that I'm very happy with, but I do hope (Amazon, are you listening?) that my folder gripe is addressed at some point.
Did you get a Kindle for Christmas? What do you think of your new toy?
Although I love my Kindle and have used it often since receiving it (I opened it a week or so before Christmas and have been using it now for about 2 weeks), but I have a couple of gripes, of course, so I'll discuss those too.
First, the Kindle 2 does not come packaged with a cover, as the first edition did. Why this was omitted for the new version, I don't know...but I think it's a bad move. I went ahead and purchased an M-Edge cover for mine, and I like it, but I don't think I should have had to shell out another $25.00 on a cover for a device that used to ship with one.
Second, and much more annoying, is the fact that there is no way to organize your content via some kind of folder structure. So at this point I only have about 20 books and articles and blogs and whatnot, but eventually I expect to have hundreds. With no folder structure to organize them I foresee a huge pain in the ass trying to find things. Huge.
All in all, a fantastic device and one that I'm very happy with, but I do hope (Amazon, are you listening?) that my folder gripe is addressed at some point.
Did you get a Kindle for Christmas? What do you think of your new toy?
0 comments:
Post a Comment