I turned 50 recently and one of the benefits was I received a Kindle 2
as a present. Thank you to all those who contributed toward it.
The Kindle 2 has been my favorite toy since. I love reading. I love books from all kinds of genres. However, I don't like paying for them. The Library is a favorite place of mine, because I can find all forms of literature at the price I like. My habits have changed some with the Kindle. I get a daily newspaper delivered every morning except on Sunday and Monday. It is the Investor's Business Daily
so it only comes the days after a market close. Saturday is the day the Monday paper actually comes. I also get Investor's Business Daily
on my Kindle. For it I pay $1.99 a month. I like getting content pushed to me daily. I also get the Amazon Daily
blog, which is a very good blog. Amazon Daily is free. The advantage of having a blog pushed to your Kindle is that you can navigate it very quickly and don't have to wait for the browser to refresh.
One of the things I have found most valuable on the Kindle is the Sprint Whispernet wireless service. This makes finding books on Amazon a breeze and when you do find one and purchase it, it comes within a minute of your purchase. You can use the wireless service for internet browsing using the Kindle experimental built in browser. I have had mixed results with the browser. After fiddling with the settings I managed to get javascript turned on and I use bookmarks once I get somewhere I like so I don't have to use the small keyboard to key in my url. I found that when I use mobile type of web spaces my results are better. I found m.yahoo.com and m.google.com. Google docs would not work in the Kindle browser, but I found that zoho writer works, so I bookmarked mobile.zoho.com for web note taking. The Kindle comes with many pre-bookmarked sites for weather and maps, so you have a starting place.
The Kindle has great search facilities. You just start typing and a search entry at the bottom of the screen starts to fill in. After you have typed your term you can select where you want to search. It defaults to in the book you are reading, but you can also search your entire Kindle or some optional web locations such as wikipedia and google.
Book reading in the Kindle is the best part of the experience and what the Kindle was actually created for. The font size can be changed to a comfortable size and the resolution of the screen is simply awesome. There are no detectable jaggy edges to the type and the slight gray background makes reading in bright sunlight just fine. There is no backlight so you need to have natural light or a clip on night light to read. When you turn pages there is a flash of black as the next page draws, but it is as I say a flash. The Kindle 2 is very fast at drawing it's display even though it is very high res.
I get books from various locations. Of course Amazon has many books built for the Kindle and I have found there is a difference from one book to the next with regard to how nicely they have been formatted for the Kindle. One nice feature Amazon offers is the Try a Sample on their Kindle store. If you want to sample a book, just click this in the Kindle store and the book sample will come to your Kindle so you can get a feel for it and decide if you would like to purchase it. The Kindle doesn't come with any books. You get the User Manual and a letter from Jeff Bezos thanking you for your purchase. However, if you go to the store you will find many free books and many of the most popular books are free. Sometimes booksellers offer promotions to download a free book in hopes you will come back and buy more of their books in a series. You can also get free books that are in the public domain at many sites. My favorite is www.gutenberg.org where you can go on your Kindle or your browser to download books. Look for the .mobi file format, or alternately the .txt version. If the book has images or special formatting .mobi will be the better choice.
If you have .pdfs that need to be converted to be read on your Kindle, you can use software you load on your computer such as Calibre or you can use Amazon's service. With your Kindle you get an email address to send yourself books. If you send yourself a .pdf or word document, the Amazon service kicks in and converts the document for you. It lands on your Kindle the next time you have the wireless service enabled. Amazon has a 10 cent charge for document conversion. You don't have to use the chargeable service if you would rather load the book yourself. You are given a second email address for conversion only with no delivery. You get an email when the conversion is done and a link to download the file to your computer. You can then use the usb cable to transfer the document to your Kindle.
I use the wireless service with discretion. I have found my battery life lasts much longer by turning off the wireless. I usually turn it on a few times a day to receive my subscriptions and any documents I have sent myself. It is easy to turn the wireless off, as it is just a menu command you select from anywhere you are in the Kindle.
What am I reading? I've had it a month and already my file contents screen runs to seven pages. I have 4 different versions of the Bible on it. Most of them were free. I have a Quaran. I have the Apocrypha. I have been reading The Claverings
by Anthony Trollope which I snatched off of gutenberg. I'm reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. I have numerous developer books on it such as jQuery in Action
by Bear Bibeleault and Yehuda Katz. I owned the pdf from a previous purchase and did a Kindle conversion of it.
The Kindle has notes and clippings. You can highlight and copy a clipping and make annotations that get stored into a clippings file. I've begun to think about adding some documents to my Kindle that could be used as pda type of documents. You could easily make a document of your contacts and put it on your Kindle and then use the search feature to look somebody up. I'm also considering creating a mobile page for myself on my website that has all the information I would normally go looking for at different sources. I would like to have the scores of my local teams, perhaps some rss headlines of a blog I enjoy or news and some stock quotes of my portfolio. I haven't done that yet, but plan to build this page to quickly get what I want. The Sprint Whispernet seems to come in everywhere I go. I haven't had any problems getting connected. And since this is a free feature of the Kindle it is a real value added feature of the Kindle.
