The Kindle is starting to tickle my Christmas gadget buds, so anyone using it? How much for books and are most books available?
Is it nice to use

It’s brilliant, esp if you travel a lot. Once you get used to it, it’s just like reading a book. What more can you say?

Books prices can occasionally verge on the ridiculous (almost same as hardback for new releases) and sometimes vary day to day. Can only legitimately buy from amazon, but loads of old (and -cough- new) stuff is out there for free.

Use is fine once you’re in a book, but the interface is a bit 1990’s clunky. Expect to spend a day tapping the screen getting angry before rememebering how we used to do things (ie. with buttons rather than touchscreen).

New Sony’s may be out now though, they look good and have touch.

It’s excellent.

Have read 7 or 8 books on it now, it’s a pleasure to read on. Screen is very clear, not having to hold a book open or turn pages (the button sits nicely under your thumb when holding it) it great for lazy reading in bed.

Most stuff you’d pick up in your local bookshop is available, yes. Amazon’s pricing should always keep the Kindle edition below the cost of the cheapest paper copy – so when it’s hardback-only it’s more expensive than when it goes paperback.

eg. the Man Booker winner, The Finkler Question, is £6.64 for Kindle while the hardback is £9.49. The latest Terry Pratchett is £5.35 while the hardback is £8.99. Paperbacks will vary from a few pence to a few quid below the (already discounted) Amazon price for the paper copy, depending on how far it’s been discounted.

Plus of course there’s a huge amount of classic literature out there that is out of copyright now so free to read. I got round to reading Brave New World on it, and have a load of others that I really should have read by now (but never got round to) queued up for later.

To add to what the others said, it took me a good few hours for reading to seem natural, but it’s great now. A bit disconcerting to have an electronic device that you can’t read in dim/no light though.

Books are in the main a lot cheaper on Amazon than the Waterstones/Smiths ebook equivalents- who also have an ongoing pricing dispute with Hachettes, which means that a lot of bestsellers aren’t available electronically if you go for the Sony.

Free samples of all books are a great idea, allowing to you browse, or fill some spare time, however you see it.

Calibre is a free application which allows you to convert various other ebook formats to the Kindle file type.

Splash and get an iPad. You can get a Kindle reader for that. One device and you can do a lot more than just read books on it.

I’d add to everything above. If you travel lots it’s ace and it really is the same feeling as reading a book. Cheaper than books too (although slightly dangerous for frequent readers – a book just a click away!). It’s much smaller, lighter, longer battery life than an Ipad – plus of course waaay cheaper.

If you want to just read get a kindle. If you want to do what you can on a laptop get an ipad.

the nice thing about a book is:

you can throw it about

you can read it when a plane is taking off or landing

you can read it in the bath without worrying

you are not bothered when you accidently leave it in a hotel room

when you have read it you can give it to someone else

But you can only carry about three or four books before you start to become over encumbered. And you have to get to a bookstore or be at home to get more of them 🙂

iPad isn’t as good as an e-reader type thing for actual reading of books, because they cost four times as much, the battery lasts a fraction of the time and the screen’s not like paper.

After the last thread about this – I went out & bought one

Superb – as others have said – just like reading a book
If I want a book, it’s with me in 30 seconds

Can’t fault it, much better than the iPad for book reading, much, much better

I’m in the trade, so to speak (work for a publisher), and although it pains me to say so, the future of books is electronic, despite all the very good points llama makes. Having read Franzen’s The Corrections on the Sony Reader, there’s no way I’d even contemplate starting Freedom hardback – a big lump of tree is just so totally inconvenient, heavy, awkward to hold etc etc. And we have a house full of books. 🙁
Mrs F has read stuff on the Sony Reader and on the iPad and prefers the iPad, a lot. I haven’t yet read a book on the iPad (too distracted by everything else you can do with it), but even if you don’t get on with iBooks, you can get Kindle and Stanza on it too.
We had a Kindle 2 at work the other day, and it looks and feels like yesterday compared to the iPad. I wouldn’t buy one like I wouldn’t buy a VHS player today – it works and everything, but.
I think you’ll find that publishers won’t ‘dumb down’ their products for a black and white device that doesn’t do pictures well – they’ll publish for the iPad and if it doesn’t look good on Kindle, so be it.

the future of books is electronic

IMO, electronic hyper-availability has made curling up with an actual physical book even more of a tangible pleasure.

And don’t forget. The kindle 3G has free 3G, for life.

I like it, recently finished my first book on the KIndle. Jill Homer’s ‘Ghost Trails’ about her Iditarod adventure. It was £3+. Certainly good for travelling but you do find yourself being more careful of it then you would a paperback.

Downloading books is quick and easy.

Ids there not some issue where you don’t actually “own” the electronic copy? Didn’t folk that had bought a book found they got it snatched back?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10294586-248.html

I simply fail to see whats wrong with a book. Perhaps electronic books are the future but it needs something much much better than the current devices to do so

Oh yeah, you WILL get idiots on planes asking “Is that a Kindle?” far too often. I figured the novelty had worn off already, but clearly not.

I’m the kind of person that just wants to get on the flight and mind my own business so it drives me mad, but if you want to make friends it’s perfect.

IMO, electronic hyper-availability has made curling up with an actual physical book even more of a tangible pleasure

With my publisher’s hat on, I wish there were more people who felt that out there!

I simply fail to see whats wrong with a book

There’s nothing wrong with a book – I love them. The thing is, an e-reader is (in the case of the Kindle and Sony Readers at least) smaller, lighter, easier to hold, pretty much as easy to read (in some cases easier, since you can change the text size and orientation to suit yourself), easier and cheaper to buy books for, and the batteries last practically forever (again, in the case of e-ink devices like Kindle and Sony). The new Kindle even has a retractable light on a stick for reading in bed! It’s convenience vs lovability – you can love a book, and while I don’t think anyone could love a Kindle, sadly I do think the convenience of e-readers is going to be the thing.

I think it’s going to be like LP -> CD -> MP3: there was nothing wrong with LPs (some people think they still sound better than CDs, and they’re definitely more tactile), but CDs were more convenient. There was nothing wrong with CDs either, but MP3s, even though by definition they sound worse and you get so much less for your money, are so much more convenient that as soon as there was a decent rather than clunky player, they started stealing the market from CDs.

Perhaps electronic books are the future but it needs something much much better than the current devices to do so

Agreed, even the new gen e-ink readers are still a bit clunky, and there’s so much ergonomically wrong with the Sony 505 I don’t know where to begin, but I’m sure it won’t be long before someone brings out an e-reader that isn’t just a bit C5.

The kindle is great and a much nicer reading proposition than the iPad. If you read a lot then no comparison, backlit screens hurt my eyes after a while, the natural, ‘flat’ appearance of the kindle is just right and there are tons of free books!

I’d echo pretty much everything positive that’s been said above about the Kindle. Screen is excellent and massively better for reading than something like an iPad. Form factor is perfectly acceptable and you soon notice the benefit of not having to hold open a book. The on-screen user interface for anything other than reading is a bit clunky in places but isn’t bad. For reading it’s fine – simply buttons at the side for next/previous page. Dictionary look-up whilst you’re reading can be handy also.

Kindle store is reasonably priced, plus there are plenty of classics available for free if that floats your boat.

For £100-150 it’s definitely worth it.

I think the thing ebook reader allow you to do ‘better’ than a book is carry volume. I often dip into weighty texts, philosophy and all that, without necessarily reading the whole text in one stint. I might read a novel in a series of goes but dip into a variety of other stuff over that time period. Example – I’m reading Rabbit Run by John Updike at the mo but also having a look at The Antichrist by Nietzsche and finishing off Crime and Punishment – carry three books into the cafe? Not me! I just kindle and go!

If I had one of these can I load my own PDFs onto it (don’t mind converting PDF into ebook format)- from sources other than the Amazon store?

And what are the experiences of loading and reading RSS feeds?

You see, I loved reading RSS on my iPad before I sold it and would love to replicate that aspect without the cost, and distractions of all the other functionality the iPad had to offer.

Native PDFs are fine – upload using the USB cable, or you can email them to your Kindle via Amazon (a small fee applies). Note that with some PDFs the text comes out a bit small and you need to tweak the zoom settings to optimise the size/page width coverage.

RSS feeds I don’t know about.

Myself, I reckon it’s still not a fully mature technology so I won’t be buying into it yet. But, I will be at some point I’m sure. No there’s nothing wrong with books but they take up a huge amount of space, and if you’re travelling they’re an irritation- bulky and heavy. If you’re away from home for a couple of weeks or longer that could be a huge benefit. Can’t say as I’d miss hauling around immense hardbacks, or even big trade paperbacks.

I forgot to mention before, but within a couple of weeks of buying mine two ‘blobs’ of e-ink appeared permanently on the screen-I don’t know whether it was a manufacturing fault, or as a result of me not looking after it properly. I called Amazon, who said they’d send me a replacement, which arrived next day, with a reminder to return the old unit within 30 days.
Rather surprised by there nice attitude in dealing with this considering I told them I didn’t know whether it was my fault, especially since HTC charged me well over £100 to replace a leaking screen on a nearly new phone that hadn’t been dropped or abused.

Bike-related: Mat Hoffman’s autobiography is free on Kindle at the moment:

Anyone without a Kindle device, you can still buy Kindle books and either read them on PC/Mac, various smartphones or just have them tied to your account in case you do buy a device later.

eBook users may be interested in this;

Project Gutenberg

I’m pretty sure that the Kindle can be modified to run some form(s) of Linux too. This would probably open it up to being able to read all kinds of different formats and books obtained from less legit sources…
Probably also make it as multi-functional as an Ipad.

Kindle running Linux.

Also, it has minesweeper installed but you have to frig about with it to get that going.

What has properly sold this to me is not just the book thing but that fact that you can load and edit your own documents onto it. When I’m in and out of work I’m constantly carrying reams of papers and notes around with me. My ipod is ok for small notes but anything bigger than a couple of lines is a pain to type and unless I want to carry a laptop around with me all the time I have to use paper. the kindle solves this problem as well as making all those books available for when I’m bored.

“What has properly sold this to me is not just the book thing but that fact that you can load and edit your own documents onto it.”

Please tell me more. Can you please point me in the direction of any user sites/forums?

Kindle Review http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/look-kindle?page=0,2
Little frigs on it. http://kindletank.com/secret-shortcuts-and-functions-of-the-amazon-kindle

The rest I just got from amazon. You can import documents using USB in a number of different formats and add notes to them, edit might have been a too strong a term. You can share passages via twitter and facebook

that sounds great, but what would i do when i was in north london if i couldnt spend an hour trawling round my favourite bookshop

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 18 months 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 ecxellent. 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 suprising – and that’s without going to those awful torrent sites!

what would i do when i was in north london if i couldnt spend an hour trawling round my favourite bookshop

Whatever you like – that place closed last year.

Whatever you like – that place closed last year.

print is indeed dead the time of the kindle is upon us

I’ve got one it’s great.

Although mine’s got a scratch where one of my work colleagues didn’t understand “stop poking the screen, it’s not a touchscreen”.

The only navigation that’s important is the page turning, and that’s faultless. Navigation round the menus, homescreen, online etc is clunky but who gives a monkeys…it’s for reading books.

what would i do when i was in north london if i couldnt spend an hour trawling round my favourite bookshop

Judging by the subject matter of that bookshop I’m sure some of your chums will be up for a mammoth World Of Warcraft session. 😉

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).

Targetted user WIN! 😉

While I love books and reading, the interior of that Fantasy Centre is of great disappointment to me.

funnily enough the other side of the road is fettered pleasures, showgirls and house of harlot
purveyors of probably the kinkiest items available in this country
😈

wow is for the kindle generation

im more of an old skool roleplayer