Off Topic: Amazon Kindle
 

Anyone have one of these? Just picked one up on amazon. Just came back in stock after being out since December. Tech reviewers w/ mixed reviews. I don't read a lot and I figure it's a way to get back into reading.

Anyone with thoughts? Can pick one up via my siggy and help a brother out... Thanks

I read a lot and have thought about getting one just for the convenience of not having to drag around a bunch of books. But I also tend to read my books in places where they end up getting damaged (the beach, pool, car) so I'm not sure something electronic could withstand me.

I also borrowed a big print book from my neighbor who is legally blind and the ease on the eyes was AMAZING so I'm even considering it for that angle.

But the price is still too high to play with for me.

looks like a good product

I like mine. The battery doesn't last for weeks in mine like they say but it's pretty cool. I like being able to just start typing in a word and have it go online for a second and grab the entire wikipedia page. I have about 50 books on mine at the moment. You can make the font really big but you'll be hitting the "next page" buttons constantly. I haven't tried magazine or newspaper subscriptions on it yet. It's nice carrying around 50+ books in 1 small package. Too bad you can't get all your college textbooks in an ebook format. That'd make it perfect.

Are most books available for it? Any downsides?

Plenty of books available for it and you can always convert your own books and use a USB cable. I had some PDFs and it was as easy as just emailing my Amazon's kindle account. It cost 10 cents, but converted it into the kindle format and sent it to the kindle for me. You can do it free if you want to transfer it to the kindle yourself.

Read through this for more info: http://brentnewhall.com/Kindle_Fan_Guide.pdf

Awesome - thanks for the first hand account :) I'm going to wait a bit and see if the price drops. Or I'll get pissed off carrying 10 pounds of books on the plane one day and order one, lol.

it needs OLED color screen, blogs in b/w ewwwww

just got mine in today. pretty small and handy. great typeface and font. they had some promo on it w/ a green/earth day kind of book for free so just downloaded that, read a few pages and thought it was pretty cool..

i'm not a huge reader and hoping this will encourage me to read more. Buy one through my siggy link. Thanks

looks very cool

I am TOTALLY digging this thing! It's the size and weight of a small paperback - fit right into my pocketbook. Even though I can't access their wireless from home (so I sit in parking lots in town - looking like a geek.....), I can still download books to my computer then move them to the Kindle.

The only downsides so far: You can't download samples via your computer, only wireless and there's not a way to access your Amazon Wish Lists through the Kindle.

Besides that, it ROCKS! I'm seeing a legally blind friend next weekend who has to really limit what she can read due to small availability of big print books. I'm going to let her see if the print on the Kindle is big enough for her. I've read some of her big print books so I'm pretty sure it is. This will give her SO MANY more books to read!!

2 thumbs up!

I absolutely LOVE my Kindle. I walk around my neighborhood (yes, exercise!) and read the Wall Street Journal on my Kindle in the morning.

I was thinking of using mine on the treadmill but so far I've been going through my "Highschool songs" playlist :thumbsup I haven't been able to read regular books because they don't fit in the plastic holder so I'm hoping the Kindle will.

I'm still taking paperbacks to the beach though - I don't want it near the sand.

i actually thought of you when i received mine b/c it seems so perfect for reading paperbacks and I know you read a lot of them ... there seem to be a large number of choices there. There are a considerable number of nonfiction books on my wish list not available for Kindle yet. not really that much of a negative though. There are just some things I will have to order hard copy of.

Unfortunately, I mostly read hardbacks (because I'm too impatient to wait....) but unless they are biographies or autobiographies, or stories in some way (like Bourdain's books, Fast Food Nation, etc) I do stick to fiction.

I'll pop you a link to a Kindle site a friend gave me tomorrow.

BTW, if you ordered a Kindle in the last 30 days, their price has dropped $40 and you are eligible for a refund. But you have to ask :)

Don't you need to buy like 70 books to make it worth the purchase? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I just can't get into the Kindle like others do. I've played around with one but prefer having an open book in my lap.

Depends on what you call "worth the purchase". You save an average of about $5 a book for the download so figure out how many books you read for a price comparison.

However, I love it because I can carry a multitude of books around with me weighing less than an ounce. I can download samples, blogs, newspapers, magazines and many authors are starting to write books FOR the Kindle. For someone with a short attention span (me) it's great to be reading something and immediately change to something else. Also if you forget to take your reading glasses to the doctor's office you can make the print bigger :)

Speaking of bigger print, it will allow my legally blind neighbor to have a MUCH larger choice of "big print" books than she has now.

So far, I haven't found anything I don't like about it except that it doesn't access my already full Amazon wish lists :(