For the elderly a key advantage of a Kindle (or other device with similar functionality) is that it immediately turns every book into a large-print book. I know it has been 30 years but my great grandmother would have loved it back in the day for saving her from spending her life reading through a magnifying glass.
I use the font sizing feature myself for reading in dimly lit movie theaters while waiting for things to start. As things get darker I just up the font size.
The Sony Reader is nice (better looking and more comfortable than the Kindle, in my opinion). But the direct download ability of the Kindle is what sent me in that direction.
As ebooks become more popular (and they will), you could loan out your Kindle in return for a friend’s Kindle. Imagine being able to borrow a friend’s entire library! I would love that.
I can’t imagine why this would be all that great, unless it were an extended loan type thing and you really trust the other person to not drop your Kindle into, say, a bathtub or something.
This seems a lazy question, but since I’m here, are there scholarly texts in Kindle-appropriate formats, or just Eng-lang novels and popular non-fiction? I’d spring for a Kindle in a second if I could buy, like, Meinong’s or Husserl’s or Ingarden’s works in German, but I have doubts that (a) they’re available and (b) their purchase price would be much more affordable than the print versions of similar texts (which are already not, at least for most scholars, affordable)? And texts and commentaries in the classics (Greek and Latin)?
Since I’d have no idea what you’ve find interesting to read, you might want to look for books yourself. That way you’d know how much they cost if they are available…
Yes Sony makes a nice reader, but they lack Amazon’s supply of books. Amazon makes an acceptable reader, but has a buttload of books. Ideally Amazon would provide the books to any reader that meet certain technical requirements.
From my bit of research, it looks like when you buy an e-book from Amazon, it’s delivered wirelessly to your Kindle. It doesn’t seem to download to your computer, although since I don’t have a Kindle, I’m not doing the purchase to find out if there’s a method to do that. Perhaps a Kindle owner can clue us in.
But, it doesn’t seem there’s a way to take that file and read it on a Sony reader. As per Wikipedia, it’s a proprietary format.
Heir of Stone by S.L. Farrell
Neither had it available. It’s the book I’m reading. In fact, Sony has a book from a different series for $17.46, and amazon does not have that same book. Amazon does have yet another book for $9.99.
George R. R. Martin
Amazon: $6.39 / Sony: $7.19
Seems like Amazon is cheaper per title on average, just as they are for .mp3 compared to many others ($0.89 / $0.99). But their .mp3 are DRM free, and .AMZ appears to be proprietary.
I think the e-book market needs to mature a bit before I venture in. I have enough paper books in my queue to last until Kindle 3. Unless they end up cheap on eBay I will probably stay paper for a while.
I’ve had good luck with classics and the Kindle. Project Gutenberg has lots & lots of out-of-copyright texts that you can download for free and put on the Kindle.
Yes, you can choose to download the text to your computer. I don’t live in Whispernet range, so that’s how I get 100% of my content to my Kindle. I download it locally, then copy it over using a USB cable. Really not any more difficult than moving files from one folder to another on your computer.
The only thing not available for non-Whispernet download is the preview chapter feature. If you’re in Whispernet range, you can get the first chapter of any book for free for 30 days or something like that. For whatever reason, probably copyright, they don’t allow that feature via download. Which is kind of a bummer.
What I’ve done is save up lists of books I’d like to try, then when I go out of town I get all those free first chapters downloaded.
Not really a text editor, but you can create notes while you’re reading. They’re attached to the book and the page, if I’m remembering right.
You can’t, for example, create a new file and start typing away. Though I suppose you could do something like copy a blank text file to your Kindle, and put notes on that, and it would be like a note file.
I saw an article today that said that Amazon’s getting some flak about the text-to-speech feature, as it may be infringing on audiobooks, which are different entities, copyright-wise, IIRC. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. You’d think this would’ve occurred to Amazon’s legal eagles, but I’ve see stupider stuff happen…
Frankly it seems like a ridiculous claim to me. It is not a stored and distributed reading of it. Unless simply reading something out loud is a copyright infringement. And there are already existing devices for converting any text to speech.
Since people can already convert the stuff, it seems to me that Amazon is a well of money that they decided to tap over the issue. They can say that Amazon is putting it all into one place so it’s easy, whereas before people would have to have gotten the pieces separately.
Mainly it’s that Amazon has money.
When you think about it, listening to Microsoft Narrator read an e-text to you is totally different than having the original author or a paid voice (who’s talent is normally huge) read it are different experiences.
I don’t listen to audio books, personally, but I’ve worked with screen and text readers before and am familiar with that voice. And I watch narrated shows and listen to their voices. I don’t think a software robot can compare to David Attenborough.
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