The Kindle is a great digital reader. Some of the reviews knocked it because of the placement of the page buttons and others because it can come out of its holder.
It is easy to fix both of these minor problems. Slip a small piece of folded paper under the page button you want to disable. Fix the falling out problem by sticking a velcro button under the Kindle's back down a bit low so you can get to the power switch.
co-mingle
I was given a Sony Reader for Christmas, which I really enjoy, but.....some books I've found in the Kindle and not in the Sony reader, it would be really nice if they could co-mingle, yes I know, and peace on earth!
OMG! I bought this a few weeks ago and I haven't put it down! Every waking minute is spent reading. I was a book junkie before, but this is like getting a drug piped in by IV! Why is this so great? This is why:
1- You can buy, and be reading, virtually any book you want in seconds, just follow your impulse (even though the books are less than half price, some even .99cents, you can break your bank if you're a true bookaholic, so be careful 8-P).
2- You can access your Google email. Ha! Who knew??
3- You can store hundreds of books at a time on a memory chip, buy more chips and you can own an entire library. If you're like me, and you read numerous books simultaneously, you're going to go crazy here...
4- It can play music while you read...can you imagine? Classical in the background? Wow...
5- You can get constant, and I do mean constant, updated blog entries... (I am also a news junkie) so you can be at the *front* of the news wave...in my circles I have the scoop before anyone else even gets to turn on their TV or computers. And you know what they say, knowledge is power...hehe..
6- And last, but not least, in fact, probably the single greatest feature when you think about it, you can download samples! Three chapters of a book before you even spend a dime!! Think of the possibilities! Not only does it save you wasted money on undesirable books, but how much can you learn reading 3 chapters from any book on any one of thousands of different subjects? For FREE??
And you get it in seconds???? This is a knowledge goldmine! Plain and simple. You're going to read more, you're going to read faster (because the screen is sooo easy on the eyes and you can pick font size), and the thing barely weighs anything! No more carrying huge novels, no more boredom with the subject at hand, just switch to another book!
I can't say enough about it. There are other benefits, like the dictionary, the highlighter, the notation capability, the USB cable. Honestly, I have found my own personal heaven.
And they've dropped the price $40!... If you think it's still too expensive at $360, having bought it at $400 myself, it has already paid for itself in the value of the samples I've read alone, never mind the value of the books I've bought at less than half price.
P.S. Did I mention there are web sites where you can download free books? All the classics...if you have a student in the house, any age, that likes to read and will need novels, etc., for school, you're going to save yourself toooons of money just on the classics! Nietszche, Marx, Shakespeare, Camus, Plato, sacred books from many cultures, Bibles, and audio books!
The Kindle is a great concept, but the ergonomic design is seriously not good. The problem as I experience it is that the right and left side control bars are different. There are two things a reader wants to do: turn the page forward to a new page, or turn the page back to a prior page. He wants to be able to do this with either his left hand or his right hand--he doesn't want different protocols for different hands. If I were designing the thing, I would split the bars into same-sized sections and assign the same functions the matching sections on both sides. Simple, no? Some designer gave the present design way too much thought. I would bet the farm that 95% of users are having trouble and hate the present goofy arrangement of the control bars--I haven't mastered it in over six months of intense use. I KNOW AMAZON KNOWS THIS. WHY WOULDN'T THEY CHANGE THE CONFIGURATION ON FUTURE MODELS? ALSO, WHILE THEY ARE AT IT, WHY NOT PUT THE ON-OFF AND WIRELESS SWITCHES ON THE FRONT OF THE DEVICE WHERE THEY ARE ACCESSIBLE? THE DESIGN OF THE COVER IS SO POOR THAT I HAD TO RESORT TO VELCRO TO HOLD MY KINDLE--SO REACHING THE CONTROLS IN THE PRESENT LOCATION IS VERY, VERY DIFFICULT. Amazon has a winner here, no matter how poorly designed, but while they are working on adding titles, they could certainly tweak this device to make it more user friendly.
I thought the Kindle was all hype, but then I started getting headaches at work.
I'm a software designer with no life. That means, among other things, that I stare a a computer screen for 10-16 hours per day. Sure, I hike, camp, and take every chance I get to go be somewhere free of computer screens, but my whole life centers around the computer - especially in winter when it gets dark before I get home from work.
My work and hobbies call me to do a lot of research - reading Wikipedia, tech blogs, software manuals, proofing drafts of our own manuals... After a particularly intense week of research, I went home one day, tried to read something on the Web, and had to go lie down and close my eyes for a while. I ordered a Kindle the very next day. I have rarely had a headache since.
A word about the free Web access - Is it going to be permanent? I don't know, but it's the best chance at free (or cheap) EVDO access on a device like this. To me, it seems like a very interesting business model. Amazon needs to give the device a lot of EVDO bandwidth to let users browse their site and buy/download books. They're probably using some sort of unlimited plan. It doesn't hurt them that much to throw in Web access for free. I don't know whether it's a model that is going to work for them long-term, but it's not one that most companies would be able to offer, not being large-scale booksellers.
I downloaded a lot of free MobiPocket classics to it, too. I would never have been able to stand reading them on a computer screen (the eyestrain again), and it would have cost rather a lot to get paper copies of them all. It's still an expensive device, and I could have read them on a Sony Reader for less, but that does help defray the cost (assuming there are enough classics you've always wanted to read and haven't been able to justify buying). I even found illustrated versions of some of them, which is very nice as long as the illustrations are woodcuts (which are well-suited to the Kindle's screen).
Biggest upsides of the Kindle:
* Ability to search Wikipedia.
* Ability to easily send self a document one has to read that one would otherwise have to print out. They're not currently actually charging the ten-cent charge, but even if they were, I've had to print stuff out at college libraries where it was ten cents *per page.* I'm not going to whine about ten cents per document when the documents can be several hundred pages.
* Amazingly easy to read. I had no idea how much of web pages I was scanning when I tried to read them on a computer screen, until I looked at them on the Kindle. "Hey," I said, "I never read that sentence before!" The eyestrain was making me unconsciously scan the page.
* Very customizable text size.
* Ability to make margin notes.
Biggest downsides of the Kindle:
* The shoulder buttons are indeed too easy to accidentally click.
* The main screen is not (yet) sorted by category or user-defined tag, and everything you mail to yourself will have an author of your email address, so it can be hard to find what you're looking for. I think they are certain to fix this.
* When doing a search, it searches the entire index of your Kindle contents before offering you the option to do a Wikipedia search. This makes searches take longer than they should. They'll probably fix this too, or make searches shorter, or something.
* Occasionally the web browser freezes and needs to be rebooted; the only way to do this is to change a particular setting back and forth. Eh, it's experimental. I'm not too upset about that. Not like IE never freezes on me.
* I wish it had native PDF support.
* Can't email a document to the kindle, then email it back with margin notes. Do you have any idea how useful this would be to those of us who have to proofread stuff? However, again, I can't complain too much that they did not psychically add the feature I just dreamed up.
based on 2821 reviews
