Does anyone have one of the new Kiddles and what do they think of it? The better half has added it to her Christmas list and I want to see what people think of it – before I point out to her how many books she could get for the price of one! The reviews on Amazon seem generally positive – but given they sell it I would expect nothing less. The poorer reviews seem to be about ones that have been broken on delivery or very soon after rather than about the experience of it

Do you mean Kindle?

While you can still edit your post, it’s Kindle, not Kiddle.

Not trying to be a spelling-nazi, but this might disappear without a trace if people don’t know what you’re on about….

Oh, and sorry I can’t give any advice as I’ve got no experience of them (although I am thinking of getting the other half one for Christmas too).

Get her an iPad and install the free Kindle reader?

Far more potential use from that I think.

Get her an iPad and install the free Kindle reader?

Far more potential use from that I think.

Far more expense than the £110 for a Kindle as well

Get her an iPad and install the free Kindle reader?

Far more potential use eyestrain and arm ache from that I think.

Fixed that for you 😉

Get her an iPad and install the free Kindle reader?

Great idea 🙄

Does the battery in the iPad last between 1 week and 3 when being used??

Is the generic response to any electronic gadget request, an Apple product?

iPad with kindle reader is NO substitute for a dedicated machine, as above.

My sister bought one a few weeks ago, and TBH it isn’t bad. The screen is quite a flat matt white, not at all like a laptop screen, and the contrast with the print is good. I’d seen the adverts and wouldn’t believe you could sit in bright sun on a beach and use it, but if you did want to do that you could. Functions are fairly intuitive as well.

My Mrs saw it and decided she’d like one, and while we’d had the chance to try before we’d buy, I’ve got her one for Xmas.

Been a few threads on this recently.

Kindle owner here:

After muchos umming and ahhing I finally plumped for the 3G model about a month ago.

I shall never look back.

It’s lovely to look at, hold and read from; there are lots and lots of free books to be had, as well as being able to read PDFs, etc; and the free internet is extremely useful (at least, for someone like me whose phone is from an era when ‘smart phones’ were phones that had a shiny aerial…)

Yup, I could’ve bought 149 books at Help The Aged. Given that reasoning, I can’t justify owning a Kindle, but it is marvellous.

This may have affected my decision…

If you want any tips and tricks and links and things, gimme a shout.

I am thinking of one for myself. If you are a big new book buyer, then it makes sense as the kindle books are cheaper than the actual book, so you will make up the difference over time.

Love it. Had them for about three weeks or so, takes a few hours before it becomes ‘transparent’ to you, and you just read without thinking about the device. No eye strain, battery lasts for weeks if you turn wifi off. Simple things like variable text size make a world of difference. Interface is clunky, buttons are a bit stiff for continuous usage- I think i may get sore joints from page turning. Easy to read in bed. If you get the 3g model, it will give you free worldwide internet access- good for emergencies, but not really ideal for hours of browsing.
Downsides are no colour photos, if that’s important, and it doesn’t handle pdf’s particularly well. A lot of Amazon’s ebook prices also went up a couple of days ago when they bought into the price fixing thing.
Lots of bestsellers are also available via the Kindle equivalent of torrent sites.

I wouldn’t consider one of the Sony’s as an alternative- book prices through Waterstones and WH Smiths are a lot more than through Amazon.

One of mine had a problem with the screen a few days after I bought it- a couple of permanent black blobs developed, whether through my own fault or not I don’t know, but Amazon didn’t even ask about accidents- they just sent out a replacement straight away, and gave me a month to return the faulty one.

Pretty much all be said above

But for me, I have 2 main niggles with it

1. I like to read in the bath – you can’t really unless you buy a bulky waterproof case for it

2. It’s difficult to read in low light

Mrs Panda really loves hers, especially the ability to change font size, it means she doesnt have to remember her glasses.

There is lots of free *ahem* content out there. Some of the stuff I have looked at is only 50p cheaper than buying the paperback. I think this must change in the future or it will be like the record industry and mp3s all over again.

panda

So – Kindle vs Sony Reader?

Don’t see why anyone would buy the Sony- look at the book prices, and compare them to Amazon’s

I have one as a Christmas wish too.. I wasnt worried about the 3g bit but am intrigued as an emergency net surf device. Can you get on line email through it?

How do the pdf’s of STW work on it?

I am also a bath reader – mainly because there is a nasty whining noise from the misses side of the bed if I have my bedside light on reading late. Can you see it in the dark or is the light attachment good & unobtrusive?

My mate has one. The fact that the 3g is included and IS FREE TO THE USER is a big plus point. It means you can be on holiday on a beach overseas and still gain access to new books, much better than wifi tethered device.
The screen is very clear, though I spent the first couple of minutes trying to treat the screen like a touchscreen device. I had to lapse back into 1990’s buttons mode to use it properly.

Very good device though.

Bloody hell didn’t quite expect a flaming 🙂 It was merely a suggestion, you can do a lot of other things with an iPad and having one with Kindle on I thought it was worth mentioning.

Chill out a bit Stumpy eh! I’m not a Mac fanboi by any means, get your anti apple chip off your shoulder. 8)

I like mine. Have read several books on it, screen is great and it’s a pleasure to hold especially if you like reading while lying on your side in bed. Battery lasts ages too.

Book pricing is OK (except for the agency pricing in effect with some publishers now) but there are plenty of out-of-copyright stuff that’s free, and at any time there’s a load of more recent stuff going free. Quite a few publishers have caught on that giving away the first of a series is likely to get them more sales of the rest.

See this amazon search for what I mean.

For publishers that haven’t dictated agency pricing, the Kindle book should always be below the cheapest paper copy (hard or paperback) at amazon’s usual discounted prices as opposed to RRP. So mainstream paperbacks should be £3-4 tops which I’m OK with. And yes, there’s lots of less legitimate sources for books that can just be copied over via USB.

re: low light – it’s exactly the same in that regard as a book. Clip-on light will work fine but it depends on what your eyes are happy with.

I love my kindle. Properly lovely and simple device. Only niggle is the occasionally limited book selection on amazon although I’m sure this will improve with time.

Worth pointing out Calibre, a free web download that allows you to send any web content to the kindle for free, blogs, news etc.

I can’t really live with the flicker between page turns. Just annoys me for some reason.

It’s less time than turning a page, and I find by the time my eye has gone from bottom-right to top-left the new page is already there.

Has anyone managed to convert adobe epub to kindle format? It’s a real clincher for me getting one for my girlfriend. The library here does ebooks but only in epub, if she could get those onto a kindle I’d buy one in a shot.

I have googled it and it sounds like it can be done but I don’t know how easily.

Has anyone managed to convert adobe epub to kindle format? It’s a real clincher for me getting one for my girlfriend. The library here does ebooks but only in epub, if she could get those onto a kindle I’d buy one in a shot.

What rossrobot says – calibre. Some formatting gets a bit screwy sometimes- the odd spurious character, but it’s easy to use, and free. Won’t work on drm stuff without a plug in though, which I imagine the library stuff will be.

Just to repeat what I said last time this came up.

I live on a small Caribbean island where one of the few drawbacks is the total lack of bookshops and the ridiculously high purchase price (esp Amazon with shipping). I read quite a lot and for the last 2 years have been using a Sony reader (Kindle is fairly useless here as all the US targeted connectivity bells and whistles “advantages” don’t work). The point is that I love books and went to the Sony out of necessity and with the assumption I would mourn the loss of the printed page. Not so. I prefer the Sony for all-round reading. It obviously fails dismally on illustrated books, but for the printed word it’s superb. So much so that the printed paper books that do fall into my hands now tend to go unread – to my surprise.

I still miss bookshops though.

BTW Calibre http://www.calibre-ebook.com as a free library Software package that is excellent; far better than the Sony one. Without the Sony Store link but with automatic conversion of most file types to epub or whatever else you want to select.

The range of free books is quite surprising (surprisingly low on small Caribbean islands – but that’s without going to those awful torrent sites!)

If you go the Sony route (and if it’s purely for reading books that’s what I would do) then avoid the touch screen one as the reflections of the screen don’t help reading. A specialist bookreader will always be better for reading books than an all-purpose device – much like the rest of the world really.

Really appreciate using Kindle on my iPad – for novels and also for things like software guides that tend to be big and thick and take up lots of room on shelves and (ultimately) in dustbins.

Also enjoying using my iPad for all sorts of other documents like user manual pdf’s

Anyone know if books bought from the US site will work on a UK kindle?