It’s been a long long long time since my last post, it’s not that there hasn’t been any photography or anything good going on there has been, I’ve just been lazy about blogging and doing more reading than writing. I’ve also been doing the lazy person posting of images onto Flickr directly from LR2.
I’ve read 36 books since March 20, the date of my last post, all of these were on my first generation Kindle e-book. I have only bought two dead tree books in the past 2 months, and those were both photography books. The kindle has been great – it’s light, it’s really easy to read and I get no eye strain from it. I hear and read plenty of complaints from people who think it should have back lighting but to me that would make it more like reading a computer screen which I find much less enjoyable. To me it’s been exactly what it was touted – an electronic book – a “real” book doesn’t have back lighting, and only in rare cases does it come in color, so it’s just what I wanted, and yet so much more. The first generation kindle came with an SD card slot. I never used that card, sure I bought a 2 GB SD card for it but never used it, I had at one time 85 books on the reader with plenty of room for more before I archived them off. I know of some people who have had issues with their kindle but they’ve all had good resolutions of the problems from Amazon, I’ve never had any major problems with mine.
So now I’m sitting here with the brand new Kindle DX, I skipped buying the second generation kindle the slimmer design was appealing but there wasn’t enough difference to make me want to spend another $350.00 on it, but then they announced the DX. The DX is big. Nearly 85% bigger than those that came before, it’s also heavier than my old one but it’s very slim. It’s pretty impressive other than just the size, the e-ink text is much sharper and the enlarged reading area really gives me a sense of space, I know that I’m reading more on each page but it really feels like it not having to turn the pages so often despite my small fonts. There are a lot of little changes from the 1st gen – the 5 way controller and the way the buttons are set up is a bit different, you don’t need to go into a seperate menu to delete (archive) an item off the Kindle memory; your previously read and deleted items are in a submenu and you can re-download them from there, not just from the Amazon site; bookmarking is better with a menu button item instead of scrolling to it; and from what I hear the battery life is much improved even with whispernet active. The ability to turn the page to landscape mode (horizontal) and have the text follow it is fantastic, it becomes much more useful for me in the gym when I’m grinding away on the cardio machines. It’s also the little things – the on-off switch is also the one that puts the kindle into sleep mode, and it’s on the top, not in the back; the whispernet can be turned off with the menu button and is not a slider switch, there is no SD card slot, something that some people find distressing but made the 1st gen kindle feel less solid because of the way the back had to be removed to access it. With the increased memory 4 GB it can supposedly hold up to 3500 non-illustrated books, not sure why an expansion card is needed. The new smaller keyboard is great, I always found the old keyboard to be obtrusive and mostly useless, the new one takes up much less room and combines the number keys with the top row of letters and a function key. I don’t make notes, clippings or annotate but I still can see where there is a need for the keyboard. The native PDF support is fantastic, I’ve already viewed a document on it and it looks great.
So what don’t I like about it? The sparseness of the buttons. You’ve got all this room along the sides and there is only one button for next page and previous page on the right side when you turn the book horizontal the button is now either on the bottom or the top which is awkward, it would have been good design to see at least one next page button on the top or bottom where the thumbs are in landscape mode. The only other thing I’d say I don’t like is that I had to buy a cover for it. This might sound petty but when I’m spending nearly $500.00 the least they could do is provide a cover of some sort.
But after a few hours of using it I give it a rousing YES of approval, and I’m glad I bought a new, bigger shoulder bag since there is no way this would fit into my old one, my 1st gen kindle barely did. I may never fit 3500 books onto the Kindle itself, but I can see reading that many on it!
For a list of what I’ve been reading or am waiting to read see my Shelfari page