My new Kindle

Well, I did it...I bought one. My reasoning for purchasing my Kindle was primarily related to convenience. I am a voracious reader who is constantly carrying around at least 15 pound of books with me. I figured if I could go down to 10.3 ounces, I might prevent a hunched back or longer arms as I age. I also travel a great deal, and like any good book fanatic, I carry many books with me in the event I finish one (or 12), in the event that I don't like the one I've started, and in the event I might have to share one at the airport. What joy it would be to have just one device to carry with me.

My initial impressions...I love that I can have a new book within seconds of ordering. I love the lightness of the device and the ease of turning "pages" (also a con to be discussed later). I appreciate the fact that I can make the print any size that I want with the touch of a button. The convenience of it is the most obvious pro for me. It's light and easy to carry around. In the reading only mode, the battery is very long lasting.

Cons...you can wildly turn pages if you wiggle around too much and hit the next or previous page buttons while you're wiggling. The cover that is made to work with it is rather ill designed. Within 2 hours of receiving the device and cover, I'd broken off the thingie that hooks the Kindle to the cover. Amazon is sending me a new cover. I can spend a lot of money because I can now instantly order books that I could wait to get through interlibrary loan.

Is it worth the current price? No, probably not. Am I glad I bought it? Yes, very much so. I can haul around lots of books very easily this way. I love reading it; it's very convenient and very easy to read for long periods of time.

If you have any questions, please contact me. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Library Lynn

Thanks for posting this. I'm quite surprised by how much I want one and I'm not usually seduced by gadgets, and never thought I'd want an ebook! My reasons for getting one are much the same as yours in that I am always carrying quite a few books around with me. I am in the UK though and there don't seem to be any plans to release it here at the moment.

I am also very tempted but I've always shunned the first model year of any new thing. Unlike my older brothers, however, I am not interested in color or the ability to log on to the Internet. I have a PC for that. I just want the ability to travel around with 90,000+ books at my beck and call without violating baggage weight restrictions or acquiring back problems. But I won't jump until the price comes down, assuming the cost of downloading books doesn't go up accordingly.

I know what you mean about the first model year shun. I do love my Kindle, but I know it will be even better in later models (it slips out of the cover too easily, the on/off switches could be placed better, to name just a couple). I am also sure the price will come down on the unit itself, that seems to be the way of everything electronic.

I have a feeling the prices of the ebooks will come down as well. Not all of them are $9.99 now, those are just the best sellers. I bought The Golden Compass for $3.00 (of course, then I had to read the rest of the trilogy, all at $3.00 each). There are several books listed on the Kindle store in the $2-$4 range. The ebooks seem to be running just slightly under the paperback prices.

The free samples are very nice. I have downloaded about 30 of those... the ones I really like, I'm going to the library and putting my name on the waiting list for the print copy. If I don't do that I will break our budget!

What I LOVE though is the newspapers! Every morning I have the New York Times delivered to my Kindle... its waiting for me when I get up... there are several other papers and magazines as well, all have a 14 day free trial, I'm trying all of them, one at a time, but I have already decided that the Times I'm keeping.

I would buy the Kindle except that I don't live in the US and it's not being shipped to my country yet. I do have quite a few relatives and friends in the States, though, so I'm considering having a unit shipped to them so that they can ship it to me. But I'm not clear on how it works, so I'm not sure if it would be possible to use something like that here. Is there a particular service provider that it needs to run on, or does it just access the internet through WiFi?

yes, you have to buy your books from Amazon. You may want to go to their web site and look at their promo material. It will answer some questions.

The Whispernet feature of the Kindle runs on the Sprint wireless phone network (EVDO, whatever that means). That particular network is only available in the U.S. Its the really fast phone network, a book is loaded in about 30 seconds.

The Kindle does not have WiFi, but it does come with a USB cable so you can connect to a computer and get to Amazon that way.

I don't know if the Whispernet limitation is why Amazon is only selling in the U.S., but I have a feeling it may also have something more to do with licensing of the ebooks. Of course, I may be completely wrong here (I'm no lawyer), and as maggie1944 said, the promo material at the Amazon site may have the answer.

About having to buy your books only from Amazon... I'm pretty new at this, but I have downloaded books in the Kindle format from one other site and there are others out there I haven't gone to yet. Granted these are not the bestsellers, but the classics from the Gutenberg Project, but there are so many books I have been meaning to read that I can get for free, legally of course.

The Kindle is an Amazon product, I am buying quite a bit of stuff from them, the Kindle store does make it easy to spend money with the click of a button.

Oh, I should probably add that the wireless phone network is at no cost, which may also be one of the reasons why the unit is kind of pricey, no monthly fees or contracts with the wireless provider.

Ugh. I was hoping that "wirelessly connected" on the Amazon pages meant WiFi, not EVDO. That ruins it right there! Looks like I will have to sit this one out... again!

Yeah, quite a few people on the Amazon site are saying that the wireless instead of WiFi is a deal breaker for them too. Maybe another later version will have both...

There are other ebook readers that use e-ink screens and new ones are being announced all the time, if that helps at all.