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Over a month ago now, our editor went out and bought a Kindle. This was a hard decision, as we had spent a lot of time over here at Gadget Wisdom talking about how we weren’t going to buy a Kindle. Of course, when we said that, it cost significantly more than the $139 we paid to buy a Kindle.
Amazon announced this week you can now give Kindle books as gifts to anyone with an email address. This is a tremendous boost in possibilities. You get to give more thought to a gift than an Amazon gift card. And if the person doesn’t like it, they can get the gift card instead. We eagerly await the day we open up an email and discover that someone has gifted us a book.
The latest generation Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces, and measures 4.8 by 7.5 inches. Mashable suggests the true audience for a dedicated e-reader is someone who travels frequently, has overcrowded bookshelves, or read books for hours at a time. We focued on the overcrowded bookshelf issue. One commenter on the same story described the Kindle as “the ideal bridge for those interested in moving to a paperless environment.”
So, why did we go with the Kindle? We already had the Kindle App on Android, along with the Nook App, the Borders app, and Aldiko Book Reader. We read an entire e-book on the Droid, and it is doable. But it is a little screen. The 7″ screen is such a good, yet portable size, we’re already wondering about 7″ Android tablets(but that’s another blog post entirely).
We don’t really like DRM. If we have a choice between DRM and DRM-free, the DRM-free gets our business. So we buy O’Reilly books directly from O’Reilly, and then port them to Android and Kindle ourselves. But, with the Kindle app available on all platforms(save Linux), making it relatively easy to use your property anywhere, it is hardly the restriction that some DRM programs are.
Earlier today, we tried a free trial of a magazine on Kindle…a magazine we used to read every month. While we quickly cancelled our trial, as that title did not provide the value we desired, we still wished to read more content off the screen and on the Kindle…which is where Calibre, which we previously mentioned, comes in.
Because, as many have said before. With all the information overload that we experience with real time information sources like Twitter and such…it is nice to have a device where we can focus on what we are reading.
The next step we may do is the elimination of our classics sections in favor of Kindle books. Kindle versions of the classics are free of charge. And the shelf space would be most welcome. We’ve bought too many books to have room for more without losing something And that is why the Kindle works.
Related articles
- Why You Might Finally Give in and Buy a Kindle (lifestyle.gadgetwisdom.com)
