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David A's kindle experience |
just put Kindle 2 down after reading for a few minutes
and had the oddest feeling of seeing exactly that motion
with a similar form-factor device on StarTrek-Next Generation.
he Kindle 2 (by Amazon) is quite a nice device but
with some irritating flaws.
Physically it looks good and is very pleasant to use.
But books availability is limited, though I admit
it continues to get better day by day.
As of August 2009 very few of David Drake's long
series of books (mostly sci-fi war novels)
are available on Kindle, for example.
The Kindle DX keyboard (if you can call it a keyboard) is intially confusing but I really like it better than the 2 keyboard, I find it faster to use. Nice work, Amazon. Though diagrams (maps, for example) in books show up on DX they are hard to read. The words are too small for the dot-density on the screen (and are not adjustable).
The single-level list of books on your kindle (one can sort by date or by book name, but that is little help) means it's impossible to really keep track of things on Kindle beyond a few books. The notion that one could have 1000 books and make any sense of what is on the Kindle is ludicrous. Amazon, you have to fix this and update all our software. You have to. I say this as the owner of both a Kindle2 and a Kindle DX.
Just try to buy "Lord Of The Rings". Nope, you cannot (as of April 2 2009). Hot News: LOTR is available on kindle (April 26) Yes, I bought the trilogy on kindle. Looking forward to rereading it, my paperback copy has very fragile and yellowed pages and many pages are falling out. The Kindle version will be a joy to read and carry around.
Just try to buy a recent computer technical book. If it's available it may be priced just a couple dollars less than a physical version. This is disappointing. Maybe it was just the book I was looking for. I hear the problem is the publishers, not Amazon. So it seems yet another group (publishers) simply do not yet get it: we ebook readers are saving them a bundle in printing and distribution costs and we know it.
June 25, 2009: One of my wife's book-club books turns out to have descriptions replacing what we think would be drawings or pictures in the original book. That is interesting. And if true seems rather limiting for Kindle (I suppose this is well known to some already).
I was checking out "Giants In The Earth" (not available on Kindle as of April 2009) and noticed the amazon book web pages how have a link that one clicks to request the publisher let it become available on kindle (when it is not yet available). Very good idea, Amazon.
The 'Kindle Top Sellers' is fun to browse. Astonishingly, one (fantasy) book that seemed interesting had a $0 Kindle price! I ordered it :-) And looking at the kindle catalog (on Kindle) I have had little trouble finding interesting things for $9.99 or less.
So say you have a pdf document you want to carry with you. You get Amazon to translate it to the form the kindle understands. Not too hard (well, usually). Now you type in a search term and press 'go'. What? Not found? Ah. You have just discovered that searches only work on whole words! Partial words searches are not implemented! There is no way to change the search preferences (AFAICT). So no way to say 'pay attention to capitalization' or 'match any substring' or, well, anything. No way to add wildcards into the match. Nothing. Yuck. This makes the search really irritating when dealing with technical documents. Lets hope Kindle DX does better. I hope the native pdf support on DX works well.
When I first tried ordering a book on the Kindle it did not let me do so (it complained about credit card issues) and my attempts to use the web (Amazon kindle web pages) to get that to work failed. In spite of the fact I'd used that same Amazon account and credit card for various things including buying the Kindle! I phoned Kindle support and in 5 or 10 minutes they had it straightened out so I could buy Kindle books on Kindle. So far I've been quite happy with Amazon support generally.
June 25, 2009: You can buy a newspaper on Kindle, but I cannot: Whispernet service at home just barely works. Some of the time. Meaning I could not actually get delivery on a daily basis. Even though I live just 15 miles from the border of the city and county of San Francisco. Yes, it is hilly here, but I live near the top of a hill. Of course it's the cellphone company Kindle Amazon chose that is the key. It is possible that town restrictions play a role too. The upshot is that Kindle loses business and I lose the opportunity to get a daily newspaper tree-free.
As soon as certain magazine subscriptions run out (a couple are available on Kindle) I'm going to subscribe to them on Kindle... That should be interesting.
Kindle Deletes Books! The recent incident (July 2009) where Amazon deleted books (from one's Kindle!) one had already purchased is unacceptable. Mr. Bezos says they won't do that again, which is great news.
I like the Kindle. It is a good way to read a book. But it's somewhat less appealing than I hoped it would be.
http://reality.sgiweb.org/davea/kindle.html