Amazon Kindle arrived today

A new Amazon Kindle electronic reader arrived in today’s mail. It took about 15 minutes from the time that I opened the box until I was reading the first book that I purchased, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. The $9.99 was seamlessly withdrawn from my credit card. Amazon might make you poor with this device, but they won’t make you miserable.

This would make a great Christmas present for anyone who loves to read and travels enough that light weight is important. The screen is not nearly as bright and attractive as a color LCD, but the battery life is about 100X longer than it would be with a standard LCD display. Books are downloaded over a cell phone network and download time is minimal. The device shows up at your house already configured to know who you are and how to charge you for stuff (keep that in mind if you buy this as a gift; it will truly be the gift that keeps on giving… $9.99 holes in your credit card statement).

This is the kind of thing that the phone companies would have done a long time ago if they had any imagination (consider that you still can’t use your mobile phone in the U.S. to book a hotel room, even though the phone company knows your approximate location, Expedia knows which hotels have rooms, and the hotels are accustomed to paying substantial commissions).

I’m hopping out to Phoenix next week (Citation CJ3 to Kansas and then Cirrus SR22 the rest of the way and back) and will take nothing to read other than the Kindle, then supply a full report.

[Update after reading one book (mostly on an airplane under the reading light): The main issue for me is that turning pages interrupts the flow. I have to stop and concentrate on the last 5 or 6 words before pressing the Next button, then wait 1 second, then pick up the sentence again. I am accustomed to reading one sentence at a time, not one word at a time. It is easier to do that with a book where the pages can both be seen at one time and/or can be flipped very quickly. The Kindle would be better if there were an option to overlap a line or two between pages.

I still give the Kindle an A+ for user experience and and A- for traveling. I would give it only a C for replacing books at home or in the office.

I left the Kindle in a backpack with the screen saver on, came back a week or so later, and found the battery 100% dead. I’m not 100 percent confident that I could travel with this without the charger. (Wouldn’t it be nice if companies could agree on a way to get power to these little devices and standard hotel rooms had the right interface?)]