Happy Holidays!
Despite Bill O'Reilly's annual screed on the war on Christmas by secularists and anti-Christianists like me, I have nothing against acknowledging Christmas as the topic of the season. But I also recognize that I have friends that don't celebrate the birth of Christ and yet do celebrate the season of good will and love. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of my friends.
My wonderful husband gave me a Kindle for Christmas along with a huge gift certificate that should last me for a month or two. I hadn't had the chance to use it until this Friday when he and I and some good friends took off for the coast for a three day weekend. Other friends of ours have a beach rental that we love to use in Neskowin, Oregon. It's just off the beach and across the street from a creek (which by the way is really high and looks like another day or two of steady rain could mean trouble for the area). So for the last two days, I've had the pleasure of doing nothing but eat, drink, and read. I bought two books on Friday and have finished one already: IM by Rick R. Reed (see the review above). I've realized that the biggest problem with having a Kindle is the ease in which Amazon.com has made buying books for it. It's like an addiction. You're done with one book, and if you're bored all you have to do is go online and "buy" the next fix...I mean Kindle edition book and start reading. I'm going to have to control my buying habits or I'll exhaust my gift card too early.
The Kindle itself is quite a toy. I like it. There are problems and you can find out all about them online. There are an incredible number of reviews online for the Kindle and I read them before telling Santa I wanted one. Despite the negatives, the Kindle is a marvel and wonderful to use.
The most vexing problem I ran into immediately is the placement of the page turning buttons. There's no comfortable place to put your hands to hold the thing without inadvertently hitting the next page or previous page buttons prematurely. So finding that magic spot to hold the Kindle without hitting those buttons is difficult. I found the best thing to do is to use either the "cover" that came with the Kindle or one of the covers that are offered online for the machine. With a cover you have the left "page" that you can hold which gives you a better grip and something to hang onto other than the Kindle itself. Unfortunately even that made my hand cramp somewhat until I got used to it.
Once I got used to the electronic paper, I realized it was actually quite easy on the eyes. You do have to find the right light to read it comfortably, but you have to do the same with a paper book. You can increase or decrease the font size until you find the size that's easiest on your eyes. I increased mine to level 4 which made it a bit easier to read for me but it meant less text on the page and more page turning so I returned the font to level 3 (which I think is the default font size) and was quite satisfied.
But one of the great advantages of using a Kindle to reading a paper book is that you can look up words directly on the Kindle whenever you find yourself in that wonderful place where you aren't sure of the exact meaning of a word or phrase. Before, I'd have to put the book down, go to my dictionary and look it up. Now with the Kindle, I simply locate my cursor next to the line that has the word that I'm looking up in it and press Look up. Voila! The Kindle brings up a list of the words in the sentence and without having to interrupt your reading, you've got the definition and you continue reading. A wonderful invention. I love it.
The inventors of the Kindle also give us a wonderful set of images that pop up whenever you put your Kindle to sleep. Everything from illuminated pages from a medieval manuscript to pictures of famous writers like Brontë or Wilde.
I haven't had any problem buying books that I want yet. The gay mystery section in the Kindle Books list isn't big or comprehensive but I'm hoping it will get better. I've also found a couple of other free e-book sites that one can use to download e-books to your Kindle. One that is quite fascinating is http://manybooks.net or if you go to www.mnybks.net, which is an extension of Manybooks, you can access the books through the basic WebBrowser in Kindle and download Kindle books directly to your Kindle, the way you would an Amazon book.
Despite some basic problems that are supposedly going to be addressed with Kindle 2.0 the Kindle is fun and easy to use. It won't be the iPod of 2009 but it definitely isn't going away. Buy one and enjoy.
1 comment:
Congrats on getting the Kindle for the holidays (I'm sure you know they were in short supply the last month and still have a two month wait for new ones). You can find bargain books in every category for the Kindle - I try to highlight some of them on my blog. Don't forget to go grab the current free books (10 or 11 right now) at Amazon (I have them all listed at Books on the Knob). If you like SciFi, the Baen free library is also a great resource. Also, check out www.feedbooks.com. They also do free book (like manybooks), both classics and CCC licensed new works, but hand formatted rather than entirely software conversions. There is some overlap, but both sites have unique titles. If all else fails, you can use gutenberg.org to get unformatted versions of many texts.
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