Random Thoughts

Its been a week since I got my Amazon Kindle and I am very impressed with it. I have lot of ebooks in PDF format and wanted a good ebook reader for a long time. I feel that Kindle does a good job of displaying PDF files but does not display images. I used Amazon’s free service to convert PDF files into Kindle format and the service has been pretty fast. I have also used MobiPocket creator for conversion and it worked great.

Pros:

1. Great reader and does “disappear” while reading (and probabily why I love it the most)
2. Annotation and bookmarking features are great
3. Experimental browser allows internet surfing
4. The e-ink technology is great and does not strain my eyes at all

Cons:

1. Has some serious erganomic issues. I cannot count the number of times I accidently hit the “Next Page” button
2. PDF conversion is not great (but that is really a PDF file format issue. I recently read that Adobe is planning to make PDF conversion easier with Acrobat 10. May be that will fix this issue)
3. When searching/annotating, there is a noticable latency before the characters appear on the screen
4. The book cover does not really hold Kindle very well. I am planning to use “velcro” as suggested by a reader on Amazon

I am yet to play with the audio functionality in the Kindle and waiting for its SDK to be made available.  

Balaji Kindle Kindle