Kindle

[AndyD]

I ordered a couple of Kindle book readers from Amazon as Christmas presents for me and wifey. We're both hooked.

The new Kindle is very slim and about the size of an average paperback novel. I have to say the screen technology is absolutely brilliant. It's an electronic ink type screen and it's streets ahead of LCD screens as a book reader. You can read it in any light including direct sunlight and it's unaffected by shadows. It has a one Gig built-in memory which equates to around 800 books you can carry around in it. The battery life is unbelievable, I charged them in mid December and even wifey's which is used several hours a day is still over half charged.

The Kindle can handle PDF books but the native format is .mobi. I was a little disappointed when I first got it and loaded it with my pdf library, with pdf's you don't get all the display options such as text size and number of words per line or line spacing settings either. After a little digging I grabbed a free copy of Calibre which batch converted my whole pdf library of 3000+ books in a few hours into .mobi files. After I reloaded it with the mobi versions I never looked back. I'm reading more now than I've read since my uni days.

It can do a couple of other things such as play mp3 music through it's in-built speakers and also has a fairly convincing text to speech reader but none of the extras fall under the heading of bloatware and they don't detract from it's primary function.

I wondered if anyone else owned one or has used one and whether you enjoyed it as much as I do.