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Amazon Kindle – First Impressions

Kindle 020

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.  

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  1. kiran
    June 9th, 2008 at 06:55 | #1

    I completely agree with you. I would buy one when amazon makes these things happen:

    1. Make it look pretty (Look at iphone for god’s sake)
    2. Make it touch enabled ( In this age, pressing buttons to navigate and browsing through menus is very unintuitive for a portable device)
    3. Make it intuitive at least, if not touch.
    4. Kindly add support for all file formats, support PDFs well.

  2. Eduardo Costa
    December 16th, 2009 at 20:19 | #2

    I strongly recommend against buying a Kindle, unless you want to read only conventional junk books (since there is junk mail, I suppose that there is junk books). Amazon can decide that you cannot read a certain book because you live, for instance, in Logan, Utah. In my case, I want to buy Four Books from Anabasis, by Xenophon. The book was written two thousand and five hundred years ago. The edition Amazon sells was prepared more than one hundred years ago. There is no copyright. However, Amazon refuses to sell me the book, since I live in Logan, Utah!

    If there were good support for pdf, I could use my Kindle for reading books from Blibliotheca Augustana, or from Perseus. However, as you people noticed, support for pdf is very poor.

    Conclusion: Don’t buy a Kindle. However, if you like to collect electronic garbage, buy from me. The only thing that I was able to read was the manual. Therefore, it is almost new. But, caveat emptor! I bought a lot of ebook readers, since Franklin started selling these gadgets around 2003. I love ebook readers, and tested a lot of them. I can assure you: Kindle is by far the worse, and has the worse book selection.

  1. June 6th, 2008 at 19:20 | #1
  2. June 6th, 2008 at 19:21 | #2