Still loving it!
A few updates…
First, some personal background info. To get to work each day, I take a train and a bus. Now that the weather is half decent, I walk to the train station in the morning. It’s just about 1 mile. When I was younger and used to read a lot more, I’d get so into a book that I’d read while walking. Geeky, I know. But the Kindle is perfect for this. One of the tough parts of reading while walking is … well, reading while the book is bouncing up and down in your hand. With the Kindle, you just bump up the font size to say the second largest, and no problem. Hell, if I went to the largest size, I could probably read while jogging. Hmm….
The other thing I’ve been testing out is the battery life. The last time I charged my Kindle was Monday morning. I’ve been using it daily on my commute and at home at night. I turn off the 3G wireless except when I actually need it for something, which isn’t often, maybe a couple minutes per day. So far after 5 days use… 50% charge left! Impressive.
I’m also getting into the Kindle community and finding out all kinds of neat tips and tricks. For instance, I didn’t know that Instapaper has a Kindle service. I’ve already been using Instapaper to read web pages later on my iPhone. The Kindle service takes all your saved pages and sends them to your Kindle once a week, or whatever schedule you want, nicely indexed and formatted. Cool! There’s also KindleFeeder which sends RSS feeds to your Kindle. Note that these services send documents to your device via the Amazon conversion service, which supposedly costs 10 cents each time you use it. But from what I’ve heard, nobody has ever actually been charged for this as of yet. I’ve used it a couple of times and have not been charged.
Another cool service is Mysteria. This lets you enter any book and it will search for an ebook version of it. Not just then, but it will keep you on file, so when an ebook version finally does come out, next week, next month, or next year, it will email you and let you know. It also checks out your Amazon wish list and looks for ebook versions of anything there, so your wish list becomes a “I wish this was on my Kindle” list.
So yeah, overall, I love it. About the only bad thing I can say is that I have to restrain myself from buying too many books. I’ve been making use of the sample feature a lot. For any Kindle book on Amazon, you can click “send me a sample” and you’ll get the first chapter or two sent to you. I have a lot of samples stored. I figure I’ll used them like bookmarks or to-read lists. They are things I might want to read someday, but I already have a few purchased ones to ge through. So the samples sit there in my Kindle. Later, one might look interesting and I can read a chapter and if I like it, buy it then and there and continue reading. Saves you from dishing out a lot of money for books you might never even get to.
OK, now here’s the pitch. A lot of people have been asking me for feedback on the Kindle because they are thinking of getting one. I’ve told you what I think in this and my last post. If this pushes you over the edge toward buying one, click below and I’ll get a little commission on it.
Note, that I did the same. Tom Ortega’s post is what convinced me, so he got my commission. 🙂