Reading on a Kindle

Recently, I was lucky enough to win an iPad and one of the first apps I downloaded door it was Amazon's Kindle. Skeptical as I ewas I have to say I've found the experience quite pleasurable so far. For many of my future purchases I can picture it being used.

Having said that, I do have a fondness for physical media, I still buy albums because I just love the physical product, and it's hard to imagine that ever fully changing.

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I think there will always be demand for printed work.

The question is whether that demand will be sufficient to keep publishers afloat or rather to make physical copies of books a profitable endeavour; I suspect it won't.

donegalfella wrote: »

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I would say no more than you know you won't misplace a copy of a book. I accept what you're saying about floppy disks but that's physical media; once a book is bought on Kindle it can be downloaded to multiple devices so your books should always be there.

Plowman wrote: »

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Alll they have to do is keep a record of your purchase history; as the technology updates your library will be updated to the new format (ideally).

donegalfella wrote: »

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Not much of an issue in this country. :pac:

However, I do miss not having page numbers, and I miss not knowing how many "pages" are left in a chapter, stuff like that.

I agree, it's weird adjusting to their page count. I'm sure I'll adjust in time or they'll improve the user interface. Ditto for making annotations, which is far more likely to be viable on a touch screen device than something like the Kindle.

seamus wrote: »

That said, I've held an iPad. It's too heavy for reading long-term and the proportions are all wrong. A Kindle is half (?) the size and less than half the weight. So in that respect, presentation medium is important to me.

Have to disagree with you there, the iPad sits comfortably in my lap for hours without feeling hot or heavy. It's easy to read it in bed too, where I do most of my reading, easier than reading a traditional book I'd say.

I'm surprised so many people have written it off in this debate as irrelevant based on the superiority of eInk alone. I dislike looking at screens for long periods of time but it's actually fine.

I think I,ll be doing a lot of reading on my iPad in the future. Not so much writing though. My battery power was at 80% when I started this post; it's now at 74%.

here's a thought...if I purchase a kindle book from any Amazon site can I load it onto my friends kindle???

HibernianRunner wrote: »

No. You're Kindle is registered to your account and so any books purchased will only download to that device.

Yeah so you have a kindle file on yer kindle...what's to stop you copying it to your laptop and sending it to your friends kindle??

PatDee wrote: »

Yeah so you have a kindle file on yer kindle...what's to stop you copying it to your laptop and sending it to your friends kindle??

Don't know the answer to that never crossed my mind. Maybe someone else can answer.

I can see a use for the Kindle, but I don't think I'll ever be able to wean myself off the paper product either. I don't like the black flash when the pages turn, I find it very jarring. And I'd be worried about the obsolescence factor, I don't want to buy books only to lose them when file formats and devices change. There's also the availability issues and the implications of ownership. Technically, I believe books downloaded to a Kindle are only licensed, not bought - hence the situation a while back when users found a book had been deleted from their advice. Ideologically that troubles me, I prefer the security of a physical book.

Thinking of getting a Kindle for Christmas. What I can't stomach however is the content prices. Why is an electronic version of a book is more expensive that paper version?! Are they collecting buckets of electrons that makes books and replicating them by hand and delivering it electron by electron into the device? Greedy f*eckers!! I still fancy one though..!

The price is chosen based on that people are willing to pay, not so much cost of delivery. As there is no warehouse space cost to encourage sales prices may be higher.
For programming books where there is lots of competition on the same topics, the cost can be substantially less if you wait for the special offers.

Bought the kindle v3 and it's brilliant that my bookshelves will empty of thousand page obsolescent technical tomes in favour of a diary sized device.
Maybe they'll be replaced with more finds from the local second hand shops.

Adding m.gutenberg.org which has kindle formatted books, including images, to the inbuilt web-browser has resulted in my reading out-of-copyright books that I found too tiring to complete on a heavy laptop with a backlit screen.

Barnes and Noble have a equivalent device and service which can offer time limited sharing of books so, if nagged, Amazon might start asking publishers for the same permissions.

The notes and annotations definitely need work. At the moment they are limited to sharing to facebook/twitter.

Is 3G version worth the asking or is wifi sufficient?

Well how often are you going to find yourself outside of a wifi zone and you absolutely positively HAVE to download a book? I've only had my Kindle less than a week and any books I've ordered I've done from home wifi.
I guess it will differ for each person.

Cheers,
sombaht

Valmont wrote: »

For me, the one distinct advantage of an e-reader would be its ability to display PDF files. I'm doing a research postgrad and I'm sick of printing off 20+ page articles on A4 paper and then lugging them around losing bits here and there. If I could write notes on it, now that would be brilliant!

This has been the best aspect of the Kindle for me. It's great to be able to just put lots of physics and mathematics papers on one device that I can read anywhere instead of basically drowning under a million A4 sheets.

I've also found it great for languages. Just upload a pdf with grammar or vocab. Although this sounds obvious, it is a surprisingly good way to learn.

I think, from listening to others, that the Kindle doesn't really suit people who read fiction. I can see the reasons, the "curling up with a nice book" feeling, however I never really read fiction (except mythology). I think it's one of the few inventions that have really changed how I work and live and my learning rate has exploded thanks to it.

Enkidu wrote: »

Sorry, silly way to put it. Rather, in my own experience, from talking to others I find that those who read fiction heavily don't seem to enjoy it as much as others and are more likely to prefer a book. Not that one is a logical consequence of the other, just that it's what I've seen.

Perhaps anecdotally but I am almost exclusively a fiction reader and I love reading on my Kindle. And most fiction fans who have reviewed it seem to love it too.

I don't quite grasp why a fiction reader wouldn't like reading on a Kindle?