I sometimes get questions about my experiences and recommendations for Kindle. Here’s the scoop: I like it fine and dandy. I use it for downloaded books, but not for newspapers or magazines. Don’t judge the display by the quick photo here. It is easy to read, and the font size can be adusted to taste. Besides the marketing things you have already heard about, the things I particularly like are:
- Downloading samples of books for free, and this sort of pre-selects at no cost what my next purchases will be.
- When traveling, I don’t have to pre-decide what books I will want to read for the next 7 days.
- I like to electronically highlight the passages I like, and later I can call up the “notes” I made and see all the highlighted passages at once. This is a quick review of all the killer ideas, or wonderful writing, that captured my attention.
- Battery Life is great.
- It interoperates with the IPhone, so that I can do day reading on the PDA during lunch, and then use the normal Kindle at night, with automatic advance of the “pages” so it is all in sync.
- Because all my downloaded books are now in the Kindle’s table of contents, it is easy to remember, and recommend, that recently-read good book (instead of “blanking” on the author’s name, all my 2009 reading is at my fingertips.)
The downers are:
- Can’t loan out a great read, nor can I pass along a stinker to a charity book fair.
- Web access exists but would only be interesting if ALL other options were unavailable.
- Since it is consumer tech, it will soon be made obsolete by a cheaper and cooler device. “You paid $299 for that?!?” Dang.
I have an accountant friend that has calculated an ROI based on lower cost of books over time. For me, it is mostly the form factor, and the indexing/memory that seal the deal.
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