Amazon Kindle -- A Year Later?

Robear wrote:

Haven't seen the ghosting, at least nothing that hangs around after the page loads.

I was really surprised at the quality of the packaging, it's like they hired Apple to design the whole deal. Very minimalist but still fancy. The box for the leather cover matched the box for the Kindle. Both have a black paper motif with letters and symbols in shiny black ink all over them. It's Steve Jobs' wet dream packaging.

One cool thing is that when you put it to sleep, it brings up a page with the picture of a famous author. I got Edgar Allen Poe.

I like that it has my Amazon recommendations, and it refers to itself by my name. It's customized. Shameless but it's a good touch.

Even more shameless is the fact that mine says, "Eric's 2nd Kindle."

EDIT: No native PDF support, not interested.

TheCounselor wrote:
Robear wrote:

Haven't seen the ghosting, at least nothing that hangs around after the page loads.

I was really surprised at the quality of the packaging, it's like they hired Apple to design the whole deal. Very minimalist but still fancy. The box for the leather cover matched the box for the Kindle. Both have a black paper motif with letters and symbols in shiny black ink all over them. It's Steve Jobs' wet dream packaging.

One cool thing is that when you put it to sleep, it brings up a page with the picture of a famous author. I got Edgar Allen Poe.

I like that it has my Amazon recommendations, and it refers to itself by my name. It's customized. Shameless but it's a good touch.

Even more shameless is the fact that mine says, "Eric's 2nd Kindle."

Yeah I fully expect mine to have a frowny face if I haven't used it for awhile or scroll "happy birthday Daddy" with a link that says (Not Jacob?) on my birthday.

... yes I bought one. It will be here Friday. Stupid good reviews (and week-long business trip) pushing me over the edge...

Warlock wrote:

Yeah I fully expect mine to have a frowny face if I haven't used it for awhile or scroll "happy birthday Daddy" with a link that says (Not Jacob?) on my birthday.

... yes I bought one. It will be here Friday. Stupid good reviews (and week-long business trip) pushing me over the edge...

Congrats!

After spending a couple hours with mine this evening, I am loving it even more. The screen is much better than the original, and it was well worth the upgrade.

Plus, I got to make my grandma happy when I told her she was the recipient of my old Kindle.

I'm enjoying it too.

I did a test at the request of another GWJer. I downloaded a mixed language pdf, only a few pages with diagrams. The pdf conversion took upwards of an hour and my account and Kindle did not report it as in progress. Eventually it downloaded. Swedish and English were fine, diagrams were fine, some word placement was odd (common in conversions). Finnish lost about 15% of it's characters as undisplayable (question mark in box character), and absolutely no Cyrillic was displayed. So if you want to use the pdf conversion stick to English and common European languages.

If you are thinking of getting a Kindle, my opinion is that a cover or bag is an absolute necessity. The cover makes it easy to handle and leather is much less slippery than metal. It adds a useful heft to the unit as well, so it handles more like a book. Without the cover, it is sort of like an outsized iPod, and I could see it slipping out of my hands or sliding far when nudged quite easily. The regular warranty does not cover accidental damage, and the extended covers only one instance of it. You don't want this thing able to slide around.

Downloading can take anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes or more, even with four or five bars and a 3G connection. Not sure why. Also, after you buy a book, the Kindle is reluctant to let you back into the store menu while downloading. Not sure if this is a bug but it says you can do it, it just does not respond to the keypress in any reasonable amount of time.

That sort of niggle aside, this is the "magic book" I've had in the back of my mind since I was a kid. Small, light, good display and able to pull an entire library out of thin air. I've not tried the minimal web browser, but that would be a bonus if it's at all functional. Text to speech is a cool gimmick but I won't use it much. It sounds reasonable, not metallic tones and with some inflections (for example, you can tell when it's quoting a speaker). But not totally natural.

The books are pretty well compressed. 3 books, each several hundred pages, and 3 MB used.

A few comments:

Stanza works amazingly well for conversions, and it also makes things conveniently readable on an iPhone as well. The stanza iphone app is also about as good as you can do with a back-lit screen.

The cover is even more necessary than it was with the original Kindle, but thankfully stays on rock solid.

The screen is noticeably different. I'm not actually sure I think it's flat-out better. I liked the slight newspapery texture of the old one, but this one is clearer with an LED lamp at night. Definitely subtle, not "OMG."

A note on de-registering. I'm selling my old Kindle to a GWJer here, so I deregistered it from my Amazon account. But all my books stayed on the old Kindle even so! I'm assuming once he connects it to his Amazon account so he can start buying books, it will wipe those out, but for the moment, he's inheriting my library. I can't even find out a way to wipe them but for going one-by-one.

I've been keeping an eye on Plastic Logic as a superior alternative to Kindle 2, and just found out that they pushed their general market availability date from H2 2009 to "2010".

For me, the Kindle is the best choice while waiting for a true general purpose e-paper device. By that I mean that most of what I need, I can get from Amazon or in pdf, and I don't mind the Amazon prices. ymmv

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

I've been keeping an eye on Plastic Logic as a superior alternative to Kindle 2, and just found out that they pushed their general market availability date from H2 2009 to "2010". :(

Yeah, I saw their Demo video. Super cool looking, but based on the parts their using, I think you're looking at a $2,000 device at launch.

rabbit wrote:

A note on de-registering. I'm selling my old Kindle to a GWJer here, so I deregistered it from my Amazon account. But all my books stayed on the old Kindle even so! I'm assuming once he connects it to his Amazon account so he can start buying books, it will wipe those out, but for the moment, he's inheriting my library. I can't even find out a way to wipe them but for going one-by-one.

My fingers are crossed I won't have a Kindle full of Daniel Steel. Or worse the entire "Babysitter's Club" series...

It's porn. All porn.

rabbit wrote:

I can't even find out a way to wipe them but for going one-by-one.

They're just files on the internal storage, right?

rabbit wrote:

It's porn. All porn.

It looks like that is, in fact, a common use of the Kindle.

magnus wrote:
rabbit wrote:

It's porn. All porn.

It looks like that is, in fact, a common use of the Kindle.

This is actually Clarke's third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology will be used for looking at porn.

farley3k wrote:
rabbit wrote:

A note on de-registering. I'm selling my old Kindle to a GWJer here, so I deregistered it from my Amazon account. But all my books stayed on the old Kindle even so! I'm assuming once he connects it to his Amazon account so he can start buying books, it will wipe those out, but for the moment, he's inheriting my library. I can't even find out a way to wipe them but for going one-by-one.

My fingers are crossed I won't have a Kindle full of Daniel Steel. Or worse the entire "Babysitter's Club" series...

I'd have paid $1,500 for Rabbit's Kindle if this were true...

adam.greenbrier wrote:

This is actually Clarke's third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology will be used for looking at porn.

My law:

Any technology will only advance if it can be used for porn.

Deadron wrote:
adam.greenbrier wrote:

This is actually Clarke's third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology will be used for looking at porn.

My law:

Any technology will only advance if it can be used for porn.

That's not a bad one.

Deadron wrote:
adam.greenbrier wrote:

This is actually Clarke's third law. Any sufficiently advanced technology will be used for looking at porn.

My law:

Any technology will only advance if it can be used for porn.

Porn is truly recession proof.

TheCounselor wrote:

Have you tried the text to speech yet? That's really going to get Audible.com concerned...or maybe not.

Audible is owned by Amazon. The Kindle can play Audible books.

I don't need the Kindle 2.

My 3 year old PRS-500 still works fine. Sure the page turns aren't quite as crisp. Sure it's a little thicker. And yes, I have to use a computer (gasp) to load new books on it.

I can even handle it when people come up to me and ask if I'm reading "one of them Kindles" and have to explain that no, it's a Sony. I'm fine when I end up in a long discussion comparing all the different models. I'm even fine recommending the Kindle over the Sony.

Dammit, where's my credit card? I need the Kindle 2.

Sorry Sony.

I'm a filthy enabler!

Robear wrote:

I'm a filthy enabler! :-)

Yes kind sir, you are.

IMAGE(http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/mba/lowres/mban1798l.jpg)

I will try to swing my wife to get me one for Father's day.

kleinetako wrote:

I don't need the Kindle 2.

My 3 year old PRS-500 still works fine. Sure the page turns aren't quite as crisp. Sure it's a little thicker. And yes, I have to use a computer (gasp) to load new books on it.

I can even handle it when people come up to me and ask if I'm reading "one of them Kindles" and have to explain that no, it's a Sony. I'm fine when I end up in a long discussion comparing all the different models. I'm even fine recommending the Kindle over the Sony.

Dammit, where's my credit card? I need the Kindle 2.

Sorry Sony.

Yeah, I was "fine" with my eReader, too...
IMAGE(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ruwgu_JkUWU/SHzYLhKyWZI/AAAAAAAAAAo/Zlzhn0FxWSY/s320/Ebookwise%2BReader.jpg)
Note: That is not my hand. That person has a man-arm and a female thumbnail.

I get my Kindle today!

The more I use it, the more impressed I am. I especially like how much better the navigation is for looking up definitions of words. It's was near impossible on the Kindle 1, and smooth as silk this time around. I love how I can go to the word, and the definition pops up on the bottom of the screen. No need to sift through definitions of every word in the line to find what I am looking for, and more information is just a click away.

Lester_King wrote:

I get my Kindle today!

Me too! I have the day off and that is going to make the wait just THAT MUCH MORE excruciating.

My 'smudge' problem seems to have gone away. It does appear to be a break-in issue.

I'm disappointed in the pdf conversions. Some simple tables in the Solaris Basic Sysadmin Guide just did not come through. It won't be the panacaea for pdf users. Laptops are better for that (or maybe some other e-reader, I dunno). I was hoping to lug around the manuals without lugging the laptop.

There's an interesting sentence in Chapter 10 of the users guide. It refers to the ability to have multiple Kindles on the same account, and the manual proceeds to tell you how to transfer files to and from each of them. This means my wife and I can each share the same books, as long as only one of us has a copy at each time (as I understand it - I dunno, maybe we can *both* have them at the same time...hmm...). This is a really good idea since she does not want a separate Amazon account.

You could also do this with a friend with whom you share a lot of books (and trust, of course.)

I found all 6 of Jane Austen's books in Kindle format for $1.59 last night. Kiri was over the moon.

I'm disappointed in the pdf conversions. Some simple tables in the Solaris Basic Sysadmin Guide just did not come through. It won't be the panacaea for pdf users. Laptops are better for that (or maybe some other e-reader, I dunno). I was hoping to lug around the manuals without lugging the laptop.

Hopefully Plastic Logic will pull it off properly. 8x11" screen size will also work nicely for the technical reference type literature.

SpyNavy wrote:

I will try to swing my wife.

I'm just going to assume you all can come up with the image here yourselves.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Hopefully Plastic Logic will pull it off properly. 8x11" screen size will also work nicely for the technical reference type literature.

It will pretty much have to be more expensive, my guess is laptop-expensive. I'm also not sure how far along they are -- their presentation at Demo seemed to be glitchy.

Robear wrote:

I found all 6 of Jane Austen's books in Kindle format for $1.59 last night. Kiri was over the moon. :-)

Since these are all public domain titles, what exactly is the benefit of buying them in a Kindle format? Just curious.