Thursday, August 05, 2010

I played with a Kindle today…

… and I loved it. In fact, I think my level of interest was highly inappropriate for a public setting (I was in the middle of a bar shift).

Just a short post, this, but I just wanted to point out that it’s a great gadget that any technophile would no doubt get joy from.

More seriously, though, I think the device would actually be really useful for me. It was the Kindle DX (currently still only available through Amazon.com), which a friend had brought back with them. The larger screen (9.7”) looks like it would be brilliant for work-articles, as well as the magazines I subscribe to in PDF format, and also the PDF ARCs I receive from a handful of US publishers.

The text clarity was great (much better than my beloved Sony Reader), and the on-board PDF reader had a great feature that appeared to get rid of much of the white border on the page, therefore making the text bigger and easier to read – this is a huge advantage over the Sony, which can’t handle some PDFs, particularly those with images (which would include watermarks – such as those on PDF ARCs).

[If there are any publishers/publicists reading – I intend to buy a DX, so if you’d like me to take a look at any books as PDFs, then I’d be happy to do so. Always interested in reading new things from any publisher.]

1 comment:

  1. I kinda want one but don't. My wife even offered to buy me one yesterday.
    I like the feel and smell of a book, I love the purchasing process, I love great vividly coloured covers. I love my hundreds of feet of groaning bookshelves. I can sometimes, between books, just sit and look at my bookcases.

    I'm unhappy with the pricing of many ebooks. I'm vexed by format this Vs format that, and the inability to get something that will read everything, well. I'm a bit worried about durability, I've got books here I bought 37 years ago, they still work. I own books which are over a century old, perfectly readable. My daughter has a sony mp3/video player 16Gb smashing little thing, 5 months old and totally inert owing to a coming together with a small ammount of water from a knocked glass.

    Yet still I hanker for a kindle. I will never be wholly content till I own one. Damn you Amazon.

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