Recently I lashed out on a Kindle, after some prevarication on the web to find out more. I was quite amused by one reviewer who said that the e-ink screen was so good that spent a bit of time trying to get the plastic image off the screen – before they realised it was the screen.

 

So why get a kindle, I think the closure of bookstores around the traps and the cost of getting books sent from Amazon in the US was what tipped me over the edge. The lure of cheap Kindles on the Amazon site drew me in initially, only to discover that this was only available to US customers. FWIW i also checked out quite a few face to face. I was even prepared to pony up at a Myer store for a Sony reader but the sales assistant shrugged when it couldn’t wasn’t  plugged in to demo it, I even found the power cord out the back of the dispay case and an unused socket for him… must have been a good commission month LOL hope he was on commission,  I mean there was the plug and there was the wall – but he just kind of walked off.  Luckily Dick Smith came to the rescue with a factory refurbuished Kindle Keyboard (Kindle 3)  for $99 bucks, that arrived in the mail in a day of two for the princely sum of $4.21 for delivery..nice. Later i added an e-bay case for $6 (including delivery) that came all the way from the UK in just a week…how do they do it?

 

So with the plethora of e-book readers how did i arrive at the kindle, and the model I chose? Easy, first I had to put aside my lust for technology for technologies sake, discard the nice but not necessary features and decide what it was I  really wanted – some simple to read books on. Books being those I can buy from a store (Kindle belongs to the largest book store, Amazon ) and can read my plethora of PDF’s of existing e-books.

 

One of the big things that bugged me was some e-readers looked like they were locked down and you had to go through a cloud based service to load up your own PDF’s, not such a big deal but you know big brother and all that, what do you do with scanned content from a paper copy of a book? do you wan tthe though police looking over your shoulder? Do you want to have to pay for storage and a down load upload fee? well its in there in the fine print.

 

Anyways the kindle models had some great features, but what i was after was good price and the convenience of not having to recharge the battery all that often. Thus the e-ink, rather than colour displays was the go, months on a single charge ..seriously good. And the e-ink displays are pretty impressive. 

 

On getting my first PDF onto the Kindle i was a bit disappointed, an A4 page just isn’t all that readable on a 6″ screen and the zoom isn’t all that functional i recon. Fortunately Calibre(open source software ) came to the rescue and could do a reasonable job of reformatting so as to be quite readable.

 

Of all the Kindle models I shopped on price rather than features, after the main feature I wanted was to be able to read for extended periods of time so the other features whilst good for bragging rights just aren’t all that necessary.

 

Well its a fe month on and it seems there are kindles out there everywhere. Just one question reminds – how to explain that the kindle is ‘off’ to cabin crew on flights?