If you travel a lot or often move house, you know very well what pain in the arse is transporting your books. I've struggled with it for a number of years. A few weeks ago, I finally found a solution that suits me perfectly!
E-book readers have been around for a while and I kept checking what's available from time to time but none of them seemed to be the right thing for me. I read about Amazon Kindle when it entered the market but it had a horrible design and it was only available in US anyway.
A few weeks ago, when I was about to buy some books online and found out they weren't available in PDF format, I decided to check out
Kindle again. It took me just a few minutes to realize that the new version (3rd) was exactly what I'd been looking for. I bought it straight away.
By now, I've been using this nifty reading device for a long enough time to feel confident that I can give you a reasonably insightful opinion.
Let's start with a brief physical description. When I was trying to imagine its dimensions studying all the pictures on Amazon site, I thought it was a little too small. After receiving it and having it finally in my own hands, I had to admit that its size is absolutely perfect. Small enough for carrying easily while big enough for reading comfortably. It's also nicely light and slim.
The
eInk display which is a standard technology used for today's e-book readers is brilliant - its contrast is almost as high as black ink printed on paper and since it doesn't emit any light it doesn't tire your eyes at all (unlike a computer screen). It's also matte, so you can easily read even on a beach with direct sunlight.
The keyboard that is located at the bottom is not quite perfect - its buttons are tiny and it's quite hard to type on it but fortunately you don't spend that much time typing so it's definitely sufficient. If only there were some more functional keys you could assign functions you use most often to! It's a bit of a pain to navigate through main menu to functions you use all the time...
For 'turning' pages, there are two buttons on each side of the device - a bigger one for jumping to the next page and a smaller one for going back. As I said, both buttons are on each side, so it doesn't matter which hand you're holding the device with.
The model I've bought, can connect to the internet via wi-fi. Obviously it's not as sensitive as a laptop but it works fairly well. Although now I'd probably pay those extra $50 for a 3G version, which connects to the internet via mobile phone network. You don't pay any fees for that and you have wikipedia (which is one of the functions) as well as newspapers and blogs accessible from almost anywhere you go.
While connected to internet, buying new books on amazon directly through the device is dangerously easy.
The battery lasts for ages! It's pretty amazing actually.
eInk display consumes energy only for redrawing (turning pages), so when the picture doesn't change (reading), it doesn't use batteries at all. As a result you can use Kindle for about
a month without recharging!
What I really like about it (in contrast with all Apple iPod-like products) is that when you connect it to a computer via USB, it pops up as if it was a simple memory stick. No need for installing any software, no hassle with syncing. You just drag and drop whatever files you want (including PDF, word documents, plain text files and mp3) and go. So in fact you can use it as a memory stick too (not very big though - its capacity is 4 GB).
Speaking about file formats, here are the most important ones supported:
- native Kindle format (azw) - all Kindle books from Amazon
- mobi (non-protected) - fairly wide-spread, can be found on other e-book stores
- PDF - keeps its formatting, so it's usually better to set the screen orientation to landscape when you read a PDF document
- MS Word, plain text - you can have all your documents and notes on you all the time
There are a few applications that convert documents from one format to another. The most capable seems to be
Calibre which is available for Mac OS X, Win and Linux. Calibre is a full-featured e-book library manager but I personally use it only for converting between formats which works brilliantly. It even converts PDF files to mobi (doesn't convert into the native azw format but mobi is more than sufficient)!
From a number of software features, dictionary lookup is my favourite. Kindle ships with 2 dictionaries (Oxford Dictionary of English and The New Oxford American Dictionary) and all you have to do when you don't know what a word (in your currently open document) means is to move the cursor (using arrow keys) to it and the definition bubble pops up. To display the whole definition, just press Enter. Amazing! Reading english books has never been so easy for non-native speakers!
Other useful functions are full-text search, bookmarks, highlights (which you can even share on Facebook or Twitter) and annotations.
As for the books that are currently available, Amazon has an incredible selection. There're also more than 2 million books (published before 1923) available for free. It becomes slightly more difficult when you want to find books in a different language than English. There's amazon.fr, amazon.de, amazon.it and perhaps some more but how about Czech books? Unfortunately, Czech publishers are still rather scared of e-books instead of seeing them as a great business opportunity so not many Czech books are for sale in digital format. Here are some tips:
- there are many online forums where people share (illegally) e-books they digitalized (scan + OCR) by themselves
- probably the best e-book store is: palmknihy.cz, where you can buy a few books but more importantly you can download thousands of czech books for free (http://palmknihy.cz/free/index.php)
Displaying special Czech characters is not a problem - fonts used on Kindle support them all. You just have to make sure they are in the right encoding - the safest choice is always UTF-8.
I left the price information to the very end. I think it's more than reasonable - USD $139 for a wi-fi only and USD $189 for 3G version. I payed around AUD $200 for the wi-fi only + charger + case + shipping.
To sum it up, if you travel a lot or like moving from place to place and want to have all your books always by hand, I highly recommend buying Kindle. It'll make your life so much easier!
My favourite features:
- readability (eInk display)
- connection to a computer (USB) made easy
- battery life (up to 1 month)
- PDF support
- dictionary lookup
- price
- dimensions
Oh and what am I reading right now? Hilarious
Denik Ostravaka (daily-life stories written by an anonymous blogger living in my hometown Ostrava; the stories are written in a dialect characteristic for the area; the author's blog soon after a first few posts became by far the most popular one in Czech Republic) - you can download it for free from
palmknihy.
