Do you have experience with a Kindle? I was considering getting one, and wanted some feedback whether it was easily-readable, scratch-resistant, good on battery, worth the $300 price tag, etc. I love actual books as much as anyone, but the thought of being able to keep hundreds of my favorite texts on one little, portable device is very appealing. The fact that I can make annotations, read newspapers is even nicer.
Is Amazon the only store where you can make downloads and purchases? I'm cost-conscious now, and was wondering if some public domain works could be gotten cheaply (I've also been a bit spoiled by Project Gutenberg). From what I've heard it seems to be a proprietary type service, and you'll have to pay for whatever they charge at their store for the classics.
I know this second point is more akin to a Great Debate, but I wanted to get some thoughts on this. [http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218501227](http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218501227)
Apparently, some Orwell books (1984 and Animal Farm, ironically enough) were mass-deleted from Kindles after an issue was found with the licensing of the books. The cost of the books was refunded, true, but I find the whole affair unsettling. I feel that once you have purchased something fairly, the supplier shouldn't have the ability to unilaterally yank it away from you, even if they made a mistake on their end.
Has this soured you on your Kindle, or on the possibility of getting one?
I love my Kindle, especially for travel. The freedom of having lots of choices of reading material is awesome. I don’t get the Whispernet service at my house, so I download the books on my computer and sync them with the Kindle via USB. (One solution to not having it deleted by the “1984”-style auto-sync, I guess.) It is really easy to read the “e-ink”, and I think the new ones are probably more ergonomically instinctive (I have a 1.0, which has a too-large “next” button that’s too easy to hit. And the power button is on the back - awkward.) Battery life is excellent, especially if you turn off the wireless switch.
It does read *.txt files. I have downloaded a lot of free books from Project Gutenberg, and they work just fine on the Kindle. The formatting (i.e. spacing) isn’t as slick, but that doesn’t bug me.
Before investing, I would check on Amazon for a bunch of titles that you want to read to see if they are available. I’ve found a bunch, but I tend to read the same books all the time, and don’t mind owning both the paper and digital versions (Terry Pratchett, anyone?)
Initially, I probably wouldn’t have bought one for myself, but I received it as a gift last year. Knowing what I know now, I’d definitely buy one.
Yes. Adjustable text sizes (although only one font, a decent, if not gorgeous, serif style). It has no internal light (like a real book) so you need to provide about as much light as you’d need to read a regular book.
Hmmm… I haven’t tried scratching mine (it hasn’t gotten itchy), so I don’t really know.
Yes. Since there’s no internal light source, power is only used when you change the page. Maintaining a page uses no power. Of course, the wireless transmitter/receiver uses power, too, but you can shut it off when you’re just reading, which saves a lot of battery life.
It think so.
Yes, all of those things work relatively well.
Purchases, yes, but many public domain books are available through the Kindle store for free or at very low cost. I got the complete works of Shakespeare for $5, the complete works of Dickens for 25 cents, and I could have gotten any of their individual works for free.
Also, you can download any MS Word, HTML, or PDF document to the Kindle. If you send it directly to the Kindle wirelessly via its e-mail address, you pay 10 cents for each attachment. But you can download them for free from your computer via the USB cable. (You have to send them to Amazon to be converted to Kindle’s proprietary format first, but it only takes a couple of seconds.)
I’ve downloaded several Gutenberg editions to my Kindle.
As I said, many are free or very cheap. So far, I’ve only bought one book not in the public domain: a guidebook to Copenhagen, in preparation for my trip there last month. Then I barely used it. However, I’ve downloaded a couple dozen PD works. So I may not be a typical user.
I find it mildly troubling, since we are basically at the mercy of Amazon to maintain our copies of the e-books we’ve bought. Some people at the other thread were bitching that you would never agree to this capability with any traditional product, allowing the seller to steal your property back after you’d paid for it.
But by the same token, there are very few traditional products that I can decide I want to own and then have in my possession, no matter where I am in the U.S., within one minute, with no delivery charge. This is really the remarkable thing about the Kindle. Finish reading a Terry Pratchett book at 3 a.m. and want to jump right into the next volume? Click a few buttons, and you have it, and for somewhat less than the paperback price.
There’s much about the whole concept of cloud computing – keeping one’s own documents and other property on other people’s servers – that has a potential for serious problems. It would be nice if you could maintain backup copies on your own computer if you wanted, or had the ability to give your Kindle edition to other Kindle owners. But until a more serious and insidious threat than the 1984 fiasco manifests itself, I’m willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt for now.
That’s heartening to hear about the various formats. It seems like Amazon backs up your library too, in case your Kindle gets broken or stolen.
Aside from a few controversies which won’t affect most readers (1984 deletion, talk to speech debate) it seems ideal. Don’t know why I didn’t look into the Kindle earlier.
I considered the Kindle and ended up with a Sony Reader. I was uncomfortable with the idea that Amazon would store and control my content, and that I would only be able to purchase from Amazon. My Sony Reader stores its content on my computer. I can purchase stuff anywhere ebooks are sold. I can also download from Gutenberg and other sites. It supports any text format I have tried.
My husband has had a Kindle since they first came out–I got one about a year ago. We love them. I don’t have a problem with Amazon, either. A lot of the old classics are available free of charge, and most new releases are $9.99.
I’ve had a Kindle for a little over a year (it’s the original model, of course). I get most of my content now from the free sites like Project Gutenberg (there are three others that I have links to at home but I don’t remember the names, I think one of them is munseys.com). All free. The only issue I have with those sites is the lack of information about authors and individual works - if you don’t already know who they are, you may have trouble figuring out if you would be interested in reading them. But you can always look authors up on Google to get some idea of what they’re like.
The biggest drawback for me is the battery. I don’t believe that power is only used to change the page, and that keeping a page on the screen or going into “sleep” mode doesn’t use any power. My experience has been that the battery runs down a lot faster by using the “sleep” function than it does if I just turn it off when I’m not actually reading it. I strongly recommend never letting the battery indicator go below half-charged, it seems to make the battery last longer if you re-charge frequently. Also, if you buy one be sure to buy at least one or two spare batteries. My first battery would not re-charge after 3 months of use, and Amazon was out of them for months, so I had to buy one from ebay (at an inflated price) until Amazon got them in stock. My current battery has lasted for probably 5 months, so I think my strategy of frequent re-charging is working.
Final note: if I didn’t already own an electronic reader, I think I would be waiting for thislittle item: a new eReader from PlasticLogic that will be connected to Barnes & Noble (similar to the way Kindle is connected to Amazon, I suppose). There’s a demo videotoo, but the product isn’t going to be available until early 2010. This looks much more like what I’ve been hoping for in an e-book reader.
Roddy
I love my Kindle. I resisted buying one for a long time, but the idea that I can wirelessly buy and download books wherever I happen to be just appealed to me so much I had to get one. It’s very convenient, and if you finish a book you can just go out to Kindle’s shop and hunt up another one (many of them are very cheap or free).
I wish more books were available, but that’s getting better. But I liked mine so much I bought one for my spouse and for my dad (who loves his–he doesn’t get out much these days because he’s taking care of my mother who doesn’t like to leave the house, so he loves the ability to download reading material whenever he likes).
I’d argue that you don’t really own it. What you have is a service that lets you quickly and cheaply rent content, not own it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with renting books, but it’s not the same as owning them.
Jeff Bezos apologized for unpublishing the Orwell books, but that’s not good enough for me. If he were really serious about this, he wouldn’t just say that they wouldn’t do it again; he’d pledge that the next version of Kindle firmware would be unable to unpublish books. There’s no reason that Amazon needs the ability to remote-delete content from your device. They have it for exactly this sort of thing, and were just surprised by how much it blew up in their faces.
I’m not saying I’ll never buy a Kindle, but if I do, I’ll consider it as a book rental service, and, personally, the costs for book rental would need to be lower than they are right now for me to consider it a good deal.
How does the Kindle compare to the iphone for reading books? My son keeps hinting that I ought to get an iphone and this is one of the benefits he’s mentioned. Do any of Amazon’s ebooks download to non-Kindle devices?
But isn’t that the way it does work with “traditional products”? If I sell you something that I don’t have the right to sell, because it doesn’t really belong to me, are you really entitled to keep it?
Can you get magazine and newspaper subscriptions on your Kindle? It might be worth $300 to clear out the magazine backlog piling up on my coffee table.
I have the kindle app on my iPhone and it is OK in a pinch - like waiting in a restaurant or in a car waiting to pick someone up, but I can’t imagine trying to read on that little screen for a couple of hours on a plane or while in bed. The Kindle is like a moderate sized book, only lighter and it lies flat. You can set it on a tray table or hold it in one hand and not have to keep it directly in front of your face as you would an iPhone. The Kindle is much, much nicer.
Yes, almost all major newspapers are available on it, and a whole bunch of magazines. You can also subscribe to blogs and have them updated all day with full text.
IANAL, but since Amazon is calling these millions of transactions “sales,” not “rentals,” if they don’t learn the lesson(s) of 1984 and ever try again to take back or alter any other books, I’m pretty sure that class actions suits will be filed a nanosecond later.
However, I heard a legal commentator on NPR suggest today that someone suing a publisher for defamation in an e-book might insist that the defamatory content be deleted from all e-versions of the book, and a court might grant such a request.
Of course, I can afford to be fairly sanguine, since, as I mentioned above, so far I do have much invested, literally or figuratively, in Kindle content. If I had spent hundreds of bucks on dozens of books, I might be much more nervous about losing it at the whim of a large corporation.
It’s a Brave New World we’re entering. I hope that things can be worked out reasonably.
But…
The Kindle is an ebook; it has a reflective screen made of electronic paper and ink, which is comparatively large and can be read easily in bright light. The iPhone has a small transmitive screen which you can’t read in bright light.
I’m actually looking forward to Plastic Logic’s new reader; it is bigger than the Kindle 2 and has a touch screen rather than a keyboard, so all you see is the page. No idea what it will cost yet.
Mine’s a Kindle 2, so they probably work differently, but I’ve found my battery lasts forever if I leave the wireless off when it’s not in use. I got mine in March, and I don’t think I’ve charged it more than half a dozen times over the last four months.
Others have answered about external sources of content, such as Gutenberg, .txt, etc.
As much as I love my iPod, I love the fact that my Kindle’s not tethered to a computer. I can easily load content from Amazon when traveling away from my home computer.
I like very much the ability to keep a whole bunch of books with me. I’m a little obsessive, and before I had an iPod and Kindle, I used to debate endlessly about which books and CD’s to take with me when I travelled.
My very favorite thing, though, is the free sample option in the Kindle store. Any book that they sell is available as a free sample. You get the first chapter or two, which ends with a link to buy the rest of the book immediately. If a book looks remotely interesting, I grab the sample. Then, whether it’s days or weeks later, I can read the sample at my leisure, and decide whether to buy the book, or discard the sample. And since the store is accessible wirelessly, I can complete the transaction just about anywhere except national parks and airplanes.
And while I understand the controversy about the 1984 incident, there’s a little more to the story. It’s not like the owners of the copyright agreed to sell the book to Amazon, then changed their mind. Someone downloaded the text of the book from another country where the copyright had expired, and uploaded it to the Amazon site to sell for a profit. As far as the owners were concerned, their book was being pirated, and Amazon had sold stolen property. If I purchased a stolen car, and the original owner demanded it back, I believe they would have the right to have their property returned to them. My recourse would be to demand that the seller return my money, and in this case, Amazon refunded their customers at the time they retrieved the stolen property.
He can’t say that Amazon won’t do this again, because they may be forced to by law. However, I suspect that at the very least, next time they would contact their customers first, and attempt to purchase limited sales rights from the legitimate content owners to allow those copies that had already been sold to remain where they were.
If I sell you something that I don’t have the right to sell, because it doesn’t really belong to me, are you really entitled to keep it?