Amazon Kindle

In case you haven't seen this yet, the link is at Amazon Kindle.

I ordered mine back at the end of November and just got it a few days ago because they keep selling out so fast. So far, I love it. There are a few books that I have tried to look for that are not available on Kindle yet, but I am hoping that will change as time goes by. Sure, it's probably not for everyone. I wondered how I would like it at first since I've always rather liked books - hardback books. I dislike reading e-books at the computer, but I think that is mostly because of comfort and location than the actual reading. But this little thing is great. The electronic-paper display makes it very much like reading a "book" book. Plus, I tend to read several books at the same time so it's nice to be able to have them all on one gadget instead of having to run around and hunt down the one I want to read this instant. It has a lot of other nice features as well.

Wow, that thing looks freakin' awesome.

Free access to wikipedia was a really neat feature they mention at the end.

The fact that it uses cell phone connectivity for all its online stuff is pretty sweet too.

For the blogs it says it gives you access to, can you read the comments as well, and can you add comments? I see it has a keyboardish thing.

Oh Man, I want one of those.

One of the women we traveled to Costa Rica with recently brought her Kindle along - that thing is just darn cool. The way the screen looks is definitely more booklike than, say, an LCD.

It's way convenient for travel.

I think everyone came away wanting one of their own, even the bf who refuses to read. Heheh.

That is really cool! I think my Mom would love it. I wish there was a way to pass along a book like a used book but I can't see how that would work. If I had the money I'd get one for my mom. It would be neat if it had and audio feature on so you could bring it in your car and listen to it like audio cd too. Very cool though!

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you can listen to audio on the Kindle. I remember the lady with us mentioning that she could listen to music while reading her books, so she had a kind of soundtrack.

I'm not sure about the blogs, I haven't played around with that yet, but I'm guessing that you probably can.

And it does have audio capability - again, haven't really played with that yet and I don't know that I will because I love my ipod, too.

Another neat aspect is that you can email any document or attachment (including photos) to your amazon account and then have them sent to your Kindle. There is a fee for this, but it's only something like a dime per document.

Also you can browse the web in general. There is an "experimental" feature that lets you enter any URL and you can navigate to that website. It's not as functional as other web browsers, but you can view content at least.

It sounds and looks like Amazon did a little better this time than they did with the Dork-mobile.

I'd go broke downloading books.

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Originally posted by Dalaena
I'd go broke downloading books.

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Yeah, I didn't think about that. If every book was just a click away for Dalaena, we'd go bankrupt one $9.99 debit at a time. And the sad thing is, as fast as she reads, I would give us 2, maybe 3 months before we're filing Chapter 13.

*scratches kindle off the 2008 Christmas list*

I have a question:

If you buy a book, do you have access to it forever, even if you delete it from your SD card? Because when you eventually fill up your card, you might want to delete some stuff to make room. But what if you want one of those books back?

If Kindle makes it way to the libraries, I'll definitely get one.

I don't mind paying for books at all, but my checkbook doesn't keep up with my consumption of written materials.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
Yeah, I didn't think about that. If every book was just a click away for Dalaena, we'd go bankrupt one $9.99 debit at a time.

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You'll know Ari bought Dal a Kindle when we start seeing reg bonuses like:

"Registration Special: For this month only you'll recieve 100 orb in your bank for every $9.99 registered!"

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Originally posted by Aristotle
I have a question:

If you buy a book, do you have access to it forever, even if you delete it from your SD card? Because when you eventually fill up your card, you might want to delete some stuff to make room. But what if you want one of those books back?

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Yep. Even if you remove it from your Kindle, the book stays on your Amazon account and you can redownload it at any time. There is also an utility on the Kindle that allows you to see what items you have and where they are stored as well as enables you to move them to where you want them to be. It works pretty well. I've already accidentally deleted things and had to use it.

Plus, not all books are $9.99. Most are a lot less. In fact, there's a number of older books available that only cost around $0.50. The one thing that is a little annoying about the click and buy method is that it does a separate transaction for each item you buy. My bank has already contacted me wondering why I have so many transactions to the same vendor.

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Originally posted by Deokoria
The one thing that is a little annoying about the click and buy method is that it does a separate transaction for each item you buy. My bank has already contacted me wondering why I have so many transactions to the same vendor.

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Yeah, that'd look pretty suspicious... maybe they need to make some arrangement whereby you can pay them $50 or $100 and just keep some credit?

I do like the idea of buying books online and eliminating all the costs of printing (and not forgetting that when you buy a full-price book, you're also part-paying for the copies that get remaindered), but of course there are myriad security/reliability questions. If Amazon have conquered all those and put together something that WORKS, is usable, and doesn't let people get a million free books, good on 'em! And I reckon they'll make good money with this.

I already have a stack a mile high of books Im either reading, about to read, or feel the need to read soon, and that doesnt account for the time I spend threshing and the 300 or so research papers I have to read for my preliminary exams this spring, so ... I've gotten addicted to audiobooks. I hate to buy the actual CDs for em because my car's CD player quit working and I know I wont listen twice. I usually try to get either mysteries I dont think are literature (so, no need to keep em around), fact books that Id get tired of reading but am willing to listen to, or books that are read by the author because it adds kind of a weird extra dose of the author's interpretation (NOT a good think for Ian McKewan's Chesil Beach, by the way). SO - is this something you could use for audio? Or, if not, does anyone know a cheap audiobook service? I just load em onto my ipod and listen when I can. I listened to like five books that way when coding monkey videos for my masters, it was awesome, and I spend at least an hour and a half driving from zoo to work to school to home every day, so, its a good way NOT to just hate traffic.

Well hell, I knew it was coming, but I didn't expect it to be this soon.

I do quality assurance for a book manufacturer and figured I'd be out of a job in 10 years or so because of technology. If this thing is as nice and easy to use as it looks, maybe I better start job hunting now. :p

It even lets you choose font size, which would've been an issue for me because I'm old and prefer large print books and we don't make all books in large print.

People will soon be saying, "She always has her nose in a Kindle."

When I went to the site, I had the same feelings as everyone else, this thing looks neat.

Scrolling further to get the customer reviews, I got to the section where they have 'Tags Customers Associate with this Product'. The ones that caught my eye were 'Kindle Swindle' and 'DefectiveByDesign'.

I was already curious about some things, such as the storage specifications on the product, which I never saw written apart from being able to store '200 books!!@!'.

So my question sort of relates to one of the more common complaints -- with that SD card, or the USB cable, are you able to transfer the data to your computer and share or send it out? I imagine there is some kind of protection in place on the files, if so, similar to ipods or whatever other DRM eproducts place on their files.

In reading through some of the complaints, it seemed like you could never 'lend out' a book because it was always tied to your Kindle, and that in order to do so, you have to lend out the entire unit. So along those same lines, would that mean there is only ever one copy per unit, or can multiple devices be tied to an account? Would Ari and Dal have to fight over one Kindle if there was something they wanted to read, or could one copy be put on the computer while one remained on the Kindle? Or if they both got a unit and wanted to read the same book at the same time, do they have to both buy it for their respective units? Kind of seemed that way from what I could tell.

Editing this real quick to add these two blurbs in from someone who reviewed it, which seem to answer some of the other questions I had and some of those which you might as well now:

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Missing or Negative Features (the reason for losing one star on this review) -

* Content - I expected to be able to download ebooks from my local library (for free) and read them on my Kindle. I also expected to simply copy all types of text to my Kindle using either the SD card or the USB. I have found a work-around for my pdf files using the MobiPocket Creator. This works really well except for the Table of Contents - which didn't quite translate properly. I translated several of the free books that I downloaded from wowio. The text came over just fine, but some of the fancy text/graphic chapter headers became separated. Also, some of the books that I wanted are not available in the Kindle store yet. I have used the email conversion and that worked okay.

* Pricing Structure - I am a cheapskate in general and frequently buy my books from thrift stores, library sales and used book stores. I have several issues with the pricing and hopefully, the market will correct some of these issues. I can't share the books that I purchase and there isn't really a "used" market for ebooks. I must admit though, that the longer I used the Kindle, the more I was able to justify the book prices in relation to the convenience of having them on my device. For things like textbooks and other books where I want a "real" copy of the book, I would like to see a purchase option that includes a Kindle version for almost nothing if I am purchasing the title in book form. Also, I would like Amazon to offer me nearly free Kindle copies of all the books that I have already purchased in the past - and the list is long! I also wish the entry point was cheaper since I am spending so much on content.

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Originally posted by Merika
Well hell, I knew it was coming, but I didn't expect it to be this soon.

I do quality assurance for a book manufacturer and figured I'd be out of a job in 10 years or so because of technology. If this thing is as nice and easy to use as it looks, maybe I better start job hunting now. :p

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I don't know about that. Photocopiers didn't kill the book-printing industry; email hasn't killed the post office; mechanized industry hasn't resulted in universal unemployment. Who knows? Maybe your job will continue as it is, with perhaps slightly less work but more stringent quality requirements; or maybe you'll gently morph into Kindle-book quality assurance. Or if that fail you... there is ALWAYS work around for people who are good at distinguishing the good from the slack. With a little bit of effort you could get into software testing, or any other version of testing. No technology has yet destroyed anyone who has the skill of transferring - invariably the knowledge and skills gained at one job can be useful in another. (Anti-flame note: There have been people who've lost their jobs because a machine has come in to do it for them. All I'm saying is that such people can find related work, if they know how to look.)

A couple notes on questions that haven't been answered...

Audiobooks: yes, the Kindle can play audiobooks, in fact I'm pretty sure the Kindle supports audible.com and can play all of their material without issue. I'm a fan of audiobooks myself, especially with 10+ hour drive back and forth from home to school every semester. I use Audible.com (I have a subscription that's like $15/month and comes with a free audiobook every month... so basically it means getting most of them at at least half price... most of the newer stuff on there is $30-45... but they offer some decent discounts on audiobooks compared to cds and the like outside of the freebe's you get through the subscription)... and I use a relatively cheap Sansa Clip, 2gb mp3 player, I think it was $60? So it's not all that difficult to get set up through them if you wanted an alternative.

and for something that hasn't been brought up yet... PDFs...

The Kindle does not (or at the time of its release, did not) support PDF files... you have to convert them before you can read/view them on the device. I'm sure it has something to do with paying royalties to Adobe and it boosting the cost of the device... but it would have been an amazingly convenient feature to have. And you'd think Adobe could have cut them a deal just to get more people on the PDF bandwagon. Oh well.

The thing looks neat, it'll be interesting when they get the manufacturing caught up with demand... unfortunately because of their crazy deal with Sprint, there isn't likely to be much chance of a price drop anywhere in the next like 2 years, unless the hardware becomes significantly cheaper to produce, or they decide to take a loss per unit to get more people on board once the sales die out a bit...

But for that one dude to expect day one to be able to walk into a library and get access to ebooks... is kind of silly, especially since there's nothing on the Kindle's pretty extensive site that even hints at anything even remotely of the sort. It's a great idea for something that could become of it in the future, but that implies the use of DRM, which most people really don't like... again, if they had PDFs it'd be easy... because limited time use is something built into their file structure. Again oh well. Kuddos on the great idea, I wonder what they'll do with the Kindle 2?

I used to have an account with audible.com and then I dropped it when I was cutting costs to leave my job and go back to school ... I think maybe I pay more now, though, for enough CD books to keep me from getting bored in Atlanta traffic. If I can load em onto my ipod, even better, I can listen while I collect data at the zoo (entertainment + drowning out screaming kids and the smart Ga residents that say "I aint born from no monkey").

So thanks for adding a new regular expense to my account Bael, heh.

:D