Kindle Questions

polly7_2

asc99c wrote: »

Have you also looked at the Sony Reader? It has a memory stick slot, and can read standard text files and PDFs as supplied by Project Gutenberg, in addition to standard e-book formats. To me it also looks substantially nicer, and is a more similar size to a book.

I am not in the slightest bit techy so researched the kindle & sony well before buying. I see all the reviews for the sony were disappointing, especially on the speed of the page turning.
I went for the basic kindle at £109 and I couldn't be more thrilled with it. The ease of use is brilliant, it is just the best thing i have purchased for a long time. hope this helps

Nara

Ebay sell alot of books for the Kindle, like 3000+ on discs, but i guess this is illegal!

ayjaycee

I have got the 3G Kindle and have to say that it has changed the way that I read and I absolutely love it. You can get books from other than Amazon (ie. Gutenberg and others which are all free) and there is also a wide range of freebies from Amazon. I have not tried, but I gather from the net that you can also convert other ebook formats to be read in a Kindle. The Kindle PDF reader is sort of OK but the size of the most PDF books/magazines on the net means that reading them is not practical (ie. because they are usually A4 or larger, they are too small to read when shrunk to the size of the KIndle screen and scrolling around the page is not really practical. But that's far outweighed by the advantages such as (albeit limited) web access and the ability to pick up emails and documents on the move at very little cost (or no cost in the case of accessing a Gmail or Hotmail account). I recently spent 5 weeks travelling across Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the UAE by road and in every country excepy Syria I managed to get emails from home and also got a UK newspaper depivered to the Kindle every day. On top of all that, it's primary function as an ebook reader meant that I didn't have to lug half a ton of paper with me. Granted, you do not have the ability to use external memory but, given that the thing will hold something like 3000 books, I personally am not too concerned. Hope this helps and happy to answer any questions.

zyonchaos

My father in law got a Kindle so I had to set it up for him.
Download Calibre (google search for it) then you can get books from where ever you like in what ever format you like. Save them to the library in Calibre and you can convert them into whatever format you like. So for Kindle you can take .doc, .pdf, .txt, .lit etc etc etc and convert them to the correct kindle friendly format. Then save them to the kindle by either using the supplied USB cable or the wireless option. I would say personally the 3G is a waste of money as you can get a shed load of books saved onto the kindle to cover being away for any amount of time lol

Fifer

zyonchaos wrote: »

I would say personally the 3G is a waste of money as you can get a shed load of books saved onto the kindle to cover being away for any amount of time lol

I'd view it as far from a waste of money if you travel abroad much. The free experimental 3G browser capability would be worth far more (to me) than £40. (I have an eBook reader now, but I'm seriously considering the 3G).

MerlinMags

The main differences are: Kindle has a QWERTY keyboard, Sony has touch-screen. Sony handles EPUB and DRM (copy protection), but most savvy Kindle users can get around that problem with 'mobigen' or 'savory' software. A friend of mine chose the Sony as the free ebooks from the local library were in EPUB format, which the Kindle cannot read (except it can if you install an app on your PC or in the Kindle itself).

One sad point for me was that the Kindle's web browser does not support copy&paste, so you cannot manipulate emails as easily as you'd like.

I also wondered if you could use it as a SatNav (albeit without any GPS), since the free 3G would allow you to visit the Google Maps website at any time....but I dont know if the browser allows dragging or clicking to zoom in, so that might not be any good.

Other random things I have learned - whilst the Kindle can play MP3s, you cannot choose the order. Amazon's ebook store lets you read the first chapter of any book for free (get the Kindle PC app to do this without buying an actual Kindle!).

Finally, if you haven't realised already, proper ebook readers that you can look at for hours, use e-ink displays. Anything that uses LCDs is just as bad as a laptop or iPhone and will hurt your eyes after 4 hours! However, LCDs are lit up and you can read in the dark. Anything with e-ink will need a clip-on book light just like paper books do!

My money-saving tip is that an ebook reader will save you money....as you don't have to buy expensive bookshelves every year (well, thats how much I read, anyway!).

mr_fishbulb

When are they going to start doing the 10" DX version over here?