re: A Review of a Kindle

Pam — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:53:21 GMT

I had to send my husband's Kindle back (regrettably). I love mine (an older one, still on the Sprint network), but his is on AT&T and it won't get any bars anywhere in the house. Very disappointing.

re: A Review of a Kindle

Neil C. Obremski — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:43:36 GMT

I finally decided to get a Kindle at the beginning of this year and thus put a cap on my enthusiasm and a pre-order in for the Kindle 2. I'd like to second your entire post. I realized I had fallen in love with it when I started to get defensive about really inaccurate articles by big-name reviewers. Anyway, some things I'd like to chime in with ...

*.) It doesn't save money, it helps you SPEND money. I've read more this year thanks to it, but I've also spent more on books because they're so deliciously easy to buy and consume.

*.) Being something of a one-trick pony is a feature by itself. When I'm reading, I'M READING. It's something of medicinal isolation from the media overload of our sound-bite culture.

*.) The web browser is better than you think, but it is crippled by the slowness of the CPU and the screen resolution (just as PDF's are since they're almost always fixed to page sizes rather than flow-based). I used the web browser almost every day to read Hacker News and look-up bus times via onebusaway.org. Again, the device is meant for reading, so most articles render just fine but don't expect images or videos.

*.) You can like a Kindle and regular books at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive. I've gotten tons of strangers asking me about my Kindle and the two main reasons people tell me they're NOT going to get one are 1. I can read for free on my iPhone/laptop/etc., and 2. I like the feel of real books. Well I do too, but given the option of two books in my Fox backpack or Kindle+moleskine+netbook, I'm gonna have to go with the latter.

*.) Finally a word on formats. Amazon chose MobiPocket's format which is actually a compiled version of Open eBook. Or at least, that's what I recall from when I messed around with it. Internally it's literally just a collection of XHTML files and one meta XML file linking them altogether. The thing that sucks is that it is binary and then has their DRM added on top (e.g. why the extension is AWZ instead of PRC or whatever Mobi usually is). They get a lot of flak for this and technically I can't imagine it's going to be difficult for them to support another XHTML-packaged format. However, given the text-to-speech debacle, the issue is probably mired amongst their partners and publishers. Why or how, I don't know.

Well, that's enough for a whole post, I hope it fits in your comment section!