I have the same - the keyboard version, without the ads (or “special offers,” as Amazon calls them), and with the 3G connectivity. It’s the bees knees. I think that you can pick up a Touch with special offers for like $80, so it’s inexpensive enough to pick one up and see if you like it. I love mine.
Getting books on it is incredibly simple: either buy them from Amazon or just drag and drop them from your computer after connecting the USB cable - there’s full instructions available from Amazon. Or, you can download the free Calibre library management software and it has a button that’ll move books to your device for you.
Amazon’s customer service has been great, too. I contacted them when I thought I’d damaged my kindle, and they were super helpful. They were even more helpful when I decided to return the new one they’d sent me after mine started working again, no harm, no foul. There’s also a bunch of forums out there with lots more info, as well.
Does anyone have any experience putting textbooks on a Kindle (or other e-reader)? Law school books are really, really heavy, but I’ve heard that most publishers now offer e-books as a no-cost addition to physical textbooks. I don’t really know whether they come in a compatible format and so on though.
You can convert any pdf to Kindle format using the drop-box “convert” email I mentioned. Docs that are mainly text usually display well inherently, but it tries to shrink wide pdfs to fit which results in illegibly tiny text unless you use the converter. However using the converter literally takes 2 seconds.
On a smaller-screened device such as a Touch, you might have a problem with large block quotes taking up more than 1 page, and footnotes are a little finicky as well (all footnotes are endnotes on the kindle, as far as I can tell - you tap the footnote number and it pops you to the note, then tap the “back” button to return.) Also if you book brief and/or highlight with margin notes it’s pretty useless. While there is a highlighting and note-taking function, it’s clumsy on the Touch. You would want a far more sophisticated tablet-type device if you want to be able to write on the page as comfortably as if it were text.
Don’t you ever run across a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that you particularly like, either because it’s particularly well-written, or it’s funny, or it imparts some information or wisdom that you want to remember? That’s what highlighting/underlining is good for, and if you do it on a Kindle, the highlighted/underlined bit not only looks that way in the text itself, but it also gets copied into a separate file called “My Clippings” or some such.
On the downside, I’ve found that sometimes, in certain situations, highlighting a bit of text can cause my Kindle to “hang” or freeze up for a couple of minutes, which is my biggest complaint about my Kindle.
If you plan on loading pdfs on a Kindle you probably don’t want the Touch, it won’t do landscape mode. I second (or third) the suggestion of getting a Special Offers version, the ads are not intrusive and you’ll save $30-40.
I like my Kindle Touch 3G a lot. If you think you’re going to be doing a lot of annotation, using the dictionary to look up words, flipping back and forth via table of contents or opening lots of footnotes and endnotes in the books you read, definitely give the touch screen some thought as it’s much easier to tap a link on the page than to fiddle a cursor up to it with a little control pad. I use mine pretty often with a study Bible and it does a great job.
I also think that the actual reflective eInk screen is a big selling point over the Kindle Fire; I spend enough time staring at computer screens during the day, I’d rather not have a light in my eyes when I’m just trying to relax and read.
As for covers, I’ve never felt the need to get one with a light because the places I read my Kindle are the same as those where I’d read a paper book (in bed, on the couch, on the train, etc.) and are thus places I have a good amount of light anyways. If you get something with eInk and really want to read without turning on a lamp, look for a lighted cover, but I haven’t found it to be a big deal.
Wait, what? Maybe it’s different for law textbooks, but other college textbooks are extremely hard to find, still. This (replacing textbooks) was my original dream when the Kindle 1 came out half a decade ago. This still remains too hard today, and I’ve all but given up on it…
You cannot read e-ink Kindles in the dark without a booklight (or other external lighting source). Reading an e-ink Kindle is like reading a printed book. The lighting conditions required for reading either is the same.
Law textbooks are usually just giant walls of text - there’s normally no pictures, insets, margin boxes, or other decorative formatting. A subheader is about as fancy as it gets. So I imagine it is considerably easier to put a law textbook on an ebook than more typical undergrad textbook. That said, I’m not sure there’s much pent up demand for casebooks in ebook form. There’s only about 10 well known casebooks available from Aspen legal publishers… I get the feeling it is more of pilot project at this point.
Yeah e-ink is not LCD. It works by physically rearranging particles that comprise the screen. The reason the battery last so long, is because as long as wifi is turned off, no power is used except in “turning the page” (rearranging the eink).
I do the vast amount of my reading on an iPod Touch, which you can get secondhand for $50 or so nowadays. It has a kindle app and a stanza app, so I can read both books from amazon and books in the epub format. (I think I can borrow epub books from my library with the Overdrive app, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.) It fits in my pocket, is very small and light, and I can carry it anywhere.
However, the screen IS very small. If you want to read PDF’s or really anything other than something formattable for a veeeery small form size (like textbooks), I think the Kindle Fire is probably the best bet. (Full disclosure: I don’t own a Kindle Fire, though I do own a keyboard Kindle which I like a lot – especially that it has good battery life – but is sort of awkward to use sometimes. I use an iPad for that kind of thing, but mine was heavily subsidized by my mom so that she could get tech support on hers; I would never recommend anyone actually drop that kind of money on an iPad.)
If you plan on putting PDFs on a kindle with any frequency, you want either the Kindle DX or a 10" tablet. PDF technical books are the one thing the smaller Kindle is horrible at - you generally have to read them in landscape, half a page at a time, and even then the PDF text is often too small. Works much better on a 10" tablet, where you often can read one whole PDF page at a time, especially with a decent PDF reader like EZPDFReader (android) that lets you zoom away the margins only, without being stuck at useless fixed zooms like “100%, 150%, 200%” where you either clip text or have huge margins.
Edit to add, I have a nook color (similar in size to kindle fire), and PDF reading is tolerable, with a decent PDF reader (I have it rooted & am using EZPDFReader, which is far better than the one it comes with). The HP Touchpad 10" I have is far better, though, for PDF books.
If you convert the pdfs to mobi format by emailing them through the Amazon server, then you don’t have to zoom and you can increase the text size like any other ebook. Note: this conversion is only useful for text based pdfs and won’t help with pdfs that have a lot of images/charts.