The Kindle - A Quick Little Review

I've had my Kindle for all of 4 hours and I think it's really cool.

The screen is really easy to read, it's simple to navigate and pretty darn straight forward to use. The wireless connection makes it really handy to download books, search wikipedia.com and it has a built in dictionary so you can look up words on the fly.

I bought it because I'm really sick of carting books around and not reading when I have time to read simply because I don't have something interesting handy. I've downloaded a bunch of sample chapters of some books I've wanted to buy and imported a few PDFs of books I already own. I've been using a free software download to do the file conversion - results vary depending on the complexity of the PDF, of course. Documents that are primarily text converted pretty nicely. The big study guide for my Microsoft exam is so-so. You can also email documents in various formats to it directly and Amazon will do the conversion for you and then deliver it automatically.

I know some people has DRM issues with the whole thing. I'm not too concerned. Sure, if you buy a book from Amazon it's in the Amazon format, but its available to transfer to other Kindle devices registered to your account (like a family member) and you can delete and re-load then as often as you want.

You can also download a lot of free books from manybooks.net and Feedbooks provides a downloadable index of their books that you can link to directly from the Kindle and download the books on the fly. Lots of classics, etc.

And seriously, having an easy way to read those crazy Microsoft white papers I feel like I'm always printing. It's totally worth it.