simplerich

The longer I have my kindle the more comfortable I get with it. One of the things that put me off when I first got it was that there was no manual. Well, there is… and it’s ON the kindle. Read away.

Another of the quibbles I had, and I believe I mentioned, was how hard it was to get anywhere in a book. Compared to thumbing through a paperback to find my place, the kindle was much harder, after reading through the instructions ON the kindle, I learned that I can use the thumbstick to navigate by chapter instead of doing it one page at a time. This made it a lot easier and faster to get to where I’m going.

I wanted to buy a magazine and see how those were done on the kindle. The cover price of the New Yorker is $4.99 but buying one issue on the kindle was $1.99 and had no dead trees involved. It was delivered within minutes and it was imminently readable. The cartoons are there and good as usual. This month’s edition had an article about the kindle curiously enough. The ease with which I subscribed, read the article, and enjoyed the comics sold me on it right away. Also, no lapcards falling out of the middle of it, and no ads for whatever it is they advertise in the New Yorker. Certainly worth it for me.

As soon as I find a way to do crossword puzzles on the kindle I’ll be thrilled! We’re not to that point yet.

In the experimental page of the kindle there is a basic web browser that I’ve used to get to the mobile versions of pages, news sites, wikipedia, webmd, and Chris’ site where I was able to make a comment from within the kindle. The keyboard is a little smallish, and I made a typo as my hands drifted off home row, but it was certainly more usable than my blackberry and bigger than that so I was happy with it. Navigation on the experimental web browser is a little hinky sometimes. It’s not super-fast at updating it’s video so it’s easy to shoot past where you’re aiming at with the thumbstick, but if I’m using that as a browser it’s a case of there’s no real browser available so it’s better than nothing and I think better than my blackberry for text intensive sites.

One of the concerns I had was how I would get some of the e-books I already own onto the kindle without having to buy them again. Sure, I’ve read them already on either the ipod or the palm t|x but I may want to re-read them on the kindle. Once again the instructions came to the rescue. If I plug my kindle into a USB port on either a mac or a PC it will open as a hard drive and I can drop .prc, .txt, and .mobi files into the Documents directory on my kindle and it will open them. This is free, unlike the e-mailing it to myself at my @kindle.com e-mail address which costs a small amount for conversion. I was worried the laptop and kindle would form some sort of ipod/computer relationship where I had to keep files synced between the two and if I plugged the kindle into one computer. I could never plug it into another, but that didn’t happen so I was/am very happy about that.

When the kindle turns itself “off” it throws up a random picture that must be built into the kindle. I haven’t looked for a way to get my own pictures on it yet at least. The pictures are of famous authors, and I keep finding them interesting. They don’t appear to have any relation to the books on the kindle because I have no John Steinbeck on mine and he’s staring at me now. Oh, and if I were Oscar Wilde I’d be really ticked, the picture they picked of him he looks like a complete fop, and maybe a bit light in the loafers if you know what I mean.

Overall, so far the kindle has been easy to use if not always intuitive, sometimes I still try and turn the page using the thumbstick and that jumps me to the next chapter. It’s convenient and amazon makes it easy to get information on to the device. The hoopla over George Orwell’s books that were fraudulently uploaded and then deleted by amazon notwithstanding I’m still very happy and comfortable with the purchase.