I’m kind of tempted, especially if I end up getting the job I’m interviewing for (since it will involve a fair bit of international travel). Has anyone gotten one of these yet? I’ve heard lots of testaments from friends of friends and whatnot, but haven’t yet spoken to anyone who has one.
I’ll ask my friend elizabeth to tell me what she hates about traveling with her kindle.
SOB
45
hehehe. No, it’ll just be like talking to her, except it’ll be posted under my psuedonym.
Elizabeth says:
Oh yeah – tell him it’s worth every penny. I adore mine. Loading books is a breeze, the selection is endless, the device looks awesome, and portability isn’t an issue. If he’s looking for something to carry around while traveling and doesn’t want to weigh down his luggage with 20 paperbacks for a three day trip (like I do), then the Kindle is perfect.
What a weird name. Is is supposed to evoke kindling? IE: Material for starting a fire, especially small pieces of dry wood?
Yeah.
Its codename was Tinder.
My girlfriend works at a place where they’ve got a ‘gadget team’ to assess the viability of new products for business use and travel. From what I understand it was officially decided that the business applications of such a thing were worse than useless and that they wouldn’t get any for their business travellers. Then one was promptly ordered for every executive.
I’ve debated one for a while. My travel went up substantially this year and there is nothing worse than carting books around in your limited travel pack. Most of the reviews I’ve seen were very positive, notably about being able to get books on the fly, carry a lot of books with you, the ability to get news sources and blogs as well, and the fact that for one initial price, you get lifetime broadband wireless capability on the unit that you don’t have to pay for.
For now, I’m carting around my laptop just to read eBooks and I usually have 1 or 2 paperbacks or one hardback as well. I’m very much NOT tied to owning a physical book, I have way too many of the damn things already. So the overall idea behind the Kindle seems very cool to me, my only decision point is will I use it enough to justify the cost.
But it doesn’t read PDF’s right? See, I download a lot of PDF stuff from the web and that would be a big issue for me.
You send your PDF to Amazon, and they convert it and send it to your kindle. It’s fine for text documents, but if it’s something with lots of pictures and a complicated layout, it will look like ass.
My OLPC laptop reads PDFs, but the reader chokes on PDFs that are 20MB or larger.
Correct, not at all from what I understand. Not to mention that natively it won’t support many other documents but they can be converted to work with Amazon’s send-in. I did not know Amazon could now convert PDF’s if so that would be nice.
The problem is it has a lot of stuff I really don’t need like a web browser (in black and white?) and an audio player (hello … we have ipods for that.) Take those out and give me more text file type capability.
I continue to have absolutely no interest in buying books that I can’t lend to friends, and which will probably be unreadable in ten years.
Face it. You’re just not selfish enough to own a Kindle, Damien.
Wait, what did Microsoft have to do with it?
It’s a gadget. It’s about books & reading. It’s free* wireless. It has nifty new display technology.
I should seriously be beating down their doors to own one but:
A) it looks like ass
B) it’s kinda expensive (ok not really for what you get)
C) I eventually plan to have a gigantic library room lined with beautiful shelves and a ladder on tracks that travels around the room.
I can’t do C) with out a shit load of the lovely things, and I am only about halfway there. A kindle would retard my already slow progress.
I own one and love it. I feel the same way about my Kindle as I did after I got a DVR: I find it hard to believe I didn’t have it before.
If you enjoy reading and like tech stuff, it’s for you.
I recommend downloading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy first. There’s something odd about reading about an electronic book on… an electronic book.
If you have any questions, PM me.
Yep, so work just booked me for MORE travel. And now the Kindle is on order. Of course I have to wait on one to be made, this feels so like ordering a laptop. It’s a hit item Amazon, get with the production program!
At any rate, thanks for the comments Jake. I hope mine works well. I’ll update after playing with it for a bit once it arrives.
My Kindle finally arrived after over six weeks on backorder.
It appears to do everything they say it will do, and do it well. The screen looks very nice and natural - I could easily imagine reading off this thing for hours at a time. The navigation is pretty straightforward, and downloading new books was a snap.
I had subscriptions (trial for now) with the Wall Street Journal and New York Times set up within a couple minutes. Downloading a full novel took maybe a minute after.
From pretty much anywhere you can instantly pop up a search bar and type:
“@web <text>”
“@wiki <text>”
“@store <text>”
to be able to execute a Google search, Wikipedia search, or Kindle Store search for anything.
I’ll post more with my experiences as I use the Kindle more. I’ve got an overnight train trip coming up in a few weeks which should test my Kindle usage to the max.