My Kindle, a Love Affair

Kindle or Sony Reader Touch, which should I choose? After much debate back and forth and after consulting many websites, I went ahead and ordered a Kindle from Amazon.com. I was so excited to get it that I picked express shipping. I ordered my Kindle on the Sunday and it would arrive on the Wednesday.

Monday

Amazon sent me an email. My Kindle has already been shipped from Arizona. The anticipation is building by the hour.

Tuesday am

I check at 6:30am when I get up in the morning. My Kindle is already in Ontario. A further check on the UPS website later that morning from work shows that it is already on the truck for delivery today! It will be delivered to my work place.

Tuesday pm

My Kindle arrives on my desk at work just before noon. Everyone I show it to gets very excited. I plug it in at reception because it need to be charged up before I can use it. That will take approximately 3 hours.

When I get home from work I download a few free ebooks and end up going to bed early to read.

I chose the Kindle for many reasons. It has the capacity to hold 1,500 books. It lets you add audiobooks and MP3s. It also has a mini browser that you can use in a pinch. You can highlight passages and add annotations, then you can download your notes to your computer. You can drag word documents onto your Kindle as well as import PDFs.There are 5 sizes of print that you can choose and you can rotate the screen in 4 directions. It also offers text to speech for some novels; not all are formatted for it.

Kindle uses eInk technology which means when a page is static, it is not using up any batter power. This article by LiamBean explains the science behind this technology.

The main selling point for me other than the ability to easily highlight and annotate was the free wireless.When Kindle first came out you could not get wireless access from Canada, but now you can. You can download books from Amazon almost instantly.

It's pretty.

It's a little heavier than I expected, but comfortable to hold.

Very thin, thinner than many magazines.

The print is very easy on the eyes .

It will fit very nicely into my purse.

Has a slight learning curve but seems simple enough.

I'll probably need my reading glasses to type anything on that keypad.

Wednesday

I carried by Kindle back to work, showed it off a little. I think I have created a few converts. Spend the time waiting for my ride reading a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that I had downloaded for free the night before. Visited the library after work to check out a book I need for research, hopefully that will soon be something I will no longer need to do.

Figured out how to drag book to my Kindle. Found out I could drag a Word document onto the Kindle where I could read it and further annotate it. Tried to drag a PDF but it was unreadable, the print was too small and it had been copied as an image. Found out later that you have to convert PDFs.

Thursday

It was a sunny afternoon, I sat outside on my afternoon break and read a bit. Later that night I downloaded more books

Friday

Dragged an audiofile to my Kindle. Works perfectly and even has a title page with info on the book. Just figured out that you can actually turn the Kindle off rather than just letting it go into sleep mode. However, it uses no power when it is in sleep mode so there is no reason to actually turn it off.

I also bought a book called Kindle secrets which cost me $2.99. I found out the Kindle comes with two games, Minesweeper and Go. I also found out you can load pictures onto the Kindle, I guess that is okay for black and white pictures. Wonder if you can create your own screensavers?

Saturday

I browsed the Amazon.com site and bought my first novels. They are books I have always loved and books that I already have in hard copy. East of Eden and The Great Gatsby, they cost a little over $6 each.

I also looked at the Kindle covers from Amazon. I am debating buying one, but I may look around town and see if I can find anything suitable.

Real Books are Better!

When ebooks first came out I was one of those who vowed I would never get a reader. That I would cling to my print books until I die. However, I have not come to realize how so much more convenient ebooks are sometimes.

That does not mean I am going to stop buying "real" books. I have 4 bookshelves full of books, many that I have not read yet.

In the meantime, my Kindle has actually got me reading more than I have been lately. It's so easy to read in bed and since I can change to font size I don't need to wear my reading glasses.

I have only had my Kindle for 5 days but it's already become attached to me. It goes to work with me, it goes to bed with me, it's sitting right next to me on the couch right now. I'm sure the novelty will wear off and it will just become another tool. Still, every time I'm holding it I keep thinking..."this is so Star Trek TNG!" Once a Trekkie, always a Trekkie...

I got the idea to do a day by day description of my Kindle's early days from Relache's great hub about her new iPad.