X-Raymond – damn you iPad auto complete! Of course I meant X-Ray.

I recently gave away several boxes of old paperbacks to charity shops. All other things being equal I still like reading a real book, but the convenience of the Kindle is hard to overlook and the fact that I already have a small library stored on it even harder. Plus there’s the fact that I’ve enjoyed a number of older books absolutely free from Project Gutenberg.

I’m surprised that you find the text ‘blocky’. I have recently acquired a Kindle Paperwhite, and the text appears pretty smooth to me, even at the small font-size I use.

I have tried reading on a variety of other devices, including a Nexus 7, and find the smaller, lighter Kindle much more comfortable.

I agree totally about the DRM and the restrictions it puts on our use of ‘our’ books.

as you mentioned in your article, one of the best “features” is the lack of distractions that i used to get when reading on my galaxy tab. much easier to immerse yourself in a book when there’s nothing else to get in the way!

I have no intention of buying one, because of the black flash, but do have the Kindle program on my Nexus7.

Problems with that include..

.. inability to sort by anything other than title or author

.. the library is very slow when you have more than 100 items. With 1,000, the OS thinks it has crashed

.. no ability to sort into folders, not even fiction/non-fiction

.. hence if you have any adult content, you can’t let kids have a look – anyone can see any item

.. you can search within titles / authors or search within a book you are reading, but not within all books.

Are any of those fixed with ‘real’ Kindles?

@Darien – well spotted. You’ve blown my (already tattered) geek credentials to smithereens!!!

I was lucky & got mine from Santa, so the extra cost wasn’t an issue. Having said that I’d still go PW if I had to buy it from new, because it really is very ‘crisp’.

Like other respondents I feel there is still plenty that Amazon can do to improve Kindle, and I hope they’ll do software upgrades rather than require a constant hardware replacement cycle….

Regarding 4. there’s a Calibre plugin (google it) that once installed automatically removed the DRM any time you export or convert a book.
I think 5-10 pounds for an e-book is a fair price, I just feel I don’t actually own a copy until I’ve removed the DRM. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before they go the way of the music industry and realise the folly of DRM. Just remember, when the publishers complain about how a couple of big companies (Amazon in particular) have monopolised the e-book market that monopolisation was only possible because of their neurotic insistence on restricting e-books into DRM walled-gardens.

DRM ?
Calibre + Plugins

I have been an avid reader all my life. I have had a kindle for about 18 months now. Here are a few of my thoughts:

Depends whether you like books or you like reading. After 5 minutes I was using my Kindle. After a further 5 minutes the ‘technology’- screen colour, font etc. disappeared and I was immersed in the story and that is what matters isn’t it the story, whatever format you read it in?

I live between Africa and Denmark and make occasional forays to other European countries including Britain, (yes it is in Europe even though it pretends not to be!). I really appreciate the fact that wherever I am, on a houseboat in Amsterdam, a campsite in Germany, at home on an island in Denmark or 40km up a dirt road in some remote mountains in Tanzania providing there is some sort of phone signal I get my weekly copy of The Economist without any fuss and without even getting out of bed.

Getting books, especially English language books, in most of the places I spend my time isn’t easy. Now, whenever I want a new title I get it within a few minutes without even leaving the house – and at a cheaper price than the paper equivalent.

We recently moved house and carrying boxes of books up, down, in and out is no fun especially as you get older. My Kindle and it’s contents go in my pocket or bag. As does my wife’s.

I have arthritis in my hands. This makes it quite painful holding some of the bigger books, the Steve Jobs biography or the Einstein one for instance. I can carry these and a few hundred others in my Kindle with ease. This matters when you travel a lot as I do.

It can take me a few days to get from one place to another on trains, boats and planes. Great not having to worry about running out of charge.

I want to read stories, be entertained, informed, amused; learn new things, laugh, be challenged or simply have the tedium of a long day travelling made a little easier. I don’t care about fonts, pixels,, bytes, gigabytes, screen colour or how this device compares to that or any other techie tosh. I just want to enjoy a good story without any of that stuff getting in the way and for me that is why the Kindle is such a satisfying device.

Re some questions here:
1. an 8.5×11″ manual unreformatted from PDF version would need too much scrolling even in Landscape mode but you can email it to your Kindle and request “Convert” in Subject title to get a reformatted version. (Not good for tables & figures tho’.)

2. Security: It has a password capability to use it at all.

3. Blocky text: Not only is the Paperwhite “crisp” w/ higher resolution, it has a built in front-light that lights the screen from the top layer and uses a capacitive touch screen.

Re the Nexus w/Kindle app. No child controls in the app that I know of, but the Kindle Fire has flexible parental-control features now.

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