Amazon Kindle

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Its here!

Got mine this morning. Absolutely brilliant!

I spent a while trying to peel off a sticker on the screen, only to find out it was the default display. It really does look like stuff is printed on top of the screen.

I have looked at other readers and am quite impressed with the Kindle's page turn speed. Still a bit of a flicker with page turns as with all e-ink readers but still, it's pretty rapid.

The search functionality is great. It allows you to search for keywords across a single book but not multiple books.

I like the fact that there are page turn buttons on left and right sides of the kindle as I often read books lying on my side.

The dictionary is good. You get both american and english dictionaries; strangely, I couldn't find the word updation in either.

The text-to-speech feature sounds very like Stephen Hawkins. I will probably buy a Stephen Hawkins book just to get the full effect.

All in all, 5 stars. For the £109 price-tag, I'm very impressed.

[Durbs]

I was surprised that there are actually readable books for FREE in the Kindle store!

Not just the normal, old 'Dracula' and aged bodice rippers/classics.

I downloaded one called 'Blood, Sweat & Tea', its a blog by a London Paramedic compiled into a book. Very good!

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PDF documents

Yes Durbs, lots of free books there. I'm going to catch up on some classics to patch up the holes in my education ... and holes there are many.

I have a few PDF documents with diagrams. I'm going to try converting these to kindle format tonight as I will then be able to take advantage of text-to-speech and font resizing.

You can email documents to your kindle account. They charge for 3G but it's free over WiFi. To use the free version, you use your.name@free.kindle.com rather than your.name@kindle.com.

If you put "convert" in your email title, it converts the doc to Kindle format.

I'm going to play with loading documents via both USB and email tonight. Will report my findings later.

[MikeC1408]

If you put "convert" in your email title, it converts the doc to Kindle format.

I'm going to play with loading documents via both USB and email tonight. Will report my findings later.

I'm looking at the WiFi version and I didn't know about the auto convert. Have a look at Calibre for converting other format eBooks to the Kindle format, It gets some very good reviews.

Should save carrying reference books full of post-its around.

Let us know what you think it after a few days use

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Owning a Kindle 2 - Day 1

I have some programming books on PDF. The PDF support isn't brilliant. I've found it slightly better on sony e-readers. On the Kindle, you can zoom in and scoot around a page but on a display that doesn't update very quickly (although the Kindle is one of the fastest), this isn't ideal.

I converted some of these books to MOBI format using a free app called Calibre (I agree with MikeC's recommendation). Calibre works great but I did find that code snippets lost their indentation. Not something I'm surprised about really as I've experienced loss of white space whilst doing a datamining project on financial PDFs using C sharp.

Navigating to a page by number isn't quite as slick as the Sony. The Sony has separate keys for each number so you can quickly enter a given page. On the Kindle, you dont have number keys so you have to press the symbol key, and choose your numbers using the five-way controller from a sub-window. This is a minor gripe though and overall navigation and searching is superb.

The in-book dictionary is really good and doesn't interfere with the reading of your book. It's great for someone with a relatively limited vocabulary like myself. Use the five way controller to navigate to your word and a small box appears at the top or bottom of the screen with a brief definition. Hitting enter sends you straight into the dictionary allowing you to read the full definition. Great feature.

I did download a Stephen Hawking book yesterday to get the full effect of the text-to-speech feature. I was gutted to find that text-to-speech is disabled for this book. Bah!

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Ordered a 3g one, due to arrive 2nd Oct

Can anyone confirm the deal regards Web Browsing over 3g? Are they going to charge for it? How will they take the money?

I just wanted to use that for e-mail, wikipedia etc.