Avian Gamers Network

Do any of you guys have an Amazon Kindle?

Danyale bought me a Kindle2 and I really love it. I flew in very late one night, and then flew off to the Bahamas early the next morning. As I waited to board the plane I realized I did not have any books on my Kindle. I fired the device up and bought some Tom Clancy books, each was downloaded wirelessly in less than a minute. Its an amazing feeling that so much content can be delivered to you in less than a minute.

But the real wow moment for me was reading Ranbow Six by the pool. The hardback of Ranbow Six is pretty big. I would be hard pressed to take such a large and bulky book to the beach or to the pool. Even on a romantic vacation, Danyale would start bitching about me weighing down her beach bag with a big heavy book. But the Kindle is so light and small, it is a breeze to throw it in a beach bag and take it anywhere. I found myself taking my Kindle places that I probably would not bring a real book.

The third thing I want to point out is the fact that it can hold so many books, it is like having your whole library in something smaller than a softback. It blew me away. Amazon will store your purchases for you, but you can back up the books to your computer if you want to be really safe.

So anyway, I thought I would review the Kindle for you, and hopefully start a conversation about how you use it. The following are some of the things I have found that make my Kindle experance even better. If you use a Kindle or another e-book reader I would love to hear how you are using it, and whether you have some good tips. If you have any questions about the Kindle I would be happy to answer them for you.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?node=154606011&keywords=-domain&field-price=0-0&sort=price&redirect=true
This is a link that returns all the free books on Amazon.com. I found some good ones, but they come and go. Right now there seems to be a lot of romance stuff, but every now and then you can find something cool.

http://manybooks.net/
This is a link to a site with a lot of free books. Most are old, I found it a great place to pick up several classics that have evaded me. Free makes it more likely that I will read them one day.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
That is the place to download a program call Calibre. When you download free books, they some times have the meta data screwed up for book name and author, this displaying weird or incorrect on your Kindle. With Calibre you can edit your meta data, rename the book or do whatever you need to better organize your book on your device. Calibre does much more, but that is all I use it for at this time.

BTW I got hundreds of Star Wars books in one torrent from TPB a few weeks ago. Very nice find.

I do not have a kindle but I have loaded it up more than once on the Amazon page thinking to buy it. I just cannot pass the cost hurdle right now.
While I do read a good bit most of my reading is of trade magazines and papers. My only other hesitation is that 90% of the books I read are also trade, technical or how to books that lean much more to skimming and thumbing than they do to a true page turner.

Kindle is great tech, once we get a color kindle with magazine subscriptions I will surely buy one.

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Moge

You guys hear about Amazon getting sued for hacking into the Kindles and deleting already-purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 and I think it was Animal Farm as well....

If it were any other books, just about, I'd let it go unnoticed. But this smacks of a government plot to subdue critical thought. Really....

Ok, not really, but I did think it was kind of funny that it was Orwell that was deleted.

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"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides." - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

I have thought about picking one up for some time now. In the end, however, I too cannot get past the price.

I love how you can access so many books from one device. I often am reading several books concurrently and to be able to take them all with me, wherever I go, would be delightful.

Also, as I age, my eyesight isn't what it used to be. I understand the newer version is easier to read, with adjustable font. A little thing like that would help on a dark plane ride.

The size is another plus for me. I never buy hard cover books, as they are just too big and bulky. The Kindle's size seems just about perfect.

I'll probably end up waiting for the next generation and see what improvements they make. A hundred dollars less and I probably would pick one up.

One question I do have, Cyrus, is how the text to speech works. I drive a lot and often listen to audion books. I understand that the feature in the Kindle isn't a production, but, if you tried it yet, can you give some feedback on how good/ bad it is?

Thanks very much for your post. The Kindle is definitely one of those things that I know I do not need, but certainly would love to have.

The text to speech is like Microsoft SAM if you ever used that. It is not as good as human reading a book, but I am surprisingly impressed with how well the technology has improved over the years. I actually use the text to speech just about every night. I have it read to me as I fall asleep.

My biggest gripe with the text to speech would be with the lack of pause after some punctuation or other places where a human would naturally pause. The software reads through those cases ... sometimes making it hard to comprehend. Likewise when it is reading the bible it will read the reference numbers and too quickly rush into the next word.

Despite those gripes I must say that I like using the text to speech. You can change it between a man or woman voice. Here is a recording I made for you to see what it is like: http://brianthibodeaux.net/ftp/Forum%20 ... titled.wma

The font size adjustment is nice. There are 6 font sizes. I use the third one which I guess is a 10 or 12 font. From there you can go up 3 more sizes.

I can easily see the next generations being something great. When electronic ink technology goes color it will be a huge step for magazines on the device, although not so important for books. I would not doubt Apple making a product that will give Amazon a run for their money. But it would not work with a backlit LCD, the electronic ink is what you need to reduce eye fatigue. That is the key to the device. People who don’t understand that don’t really understand what an e-book reader is all about.

Thanks very much for your response and the recording. It is much better than I anticipated, though maybe still a ways off from what I'd like to see.

I'm going to have to find someone with it and take a look I think. I know a couple people w/ the first version, and that is just not good enough.

I know there are a couple competitors out there so maybe I just need to do some looking and find out what I really want.

Thanks again!