Cristmas Kindle...

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I don't know how I missed this technology.

I had heard of them of course, but visions of the eye-bleeding horrors of past hand-held digital reading devices danced in my head...so I ignored them.

I probably have 20 Gigs of electronic books on my desktop, laptop, and DVDs.  They are wonderful time fillers on some of my long trips...But you need a computer to read them.

This Kindle is amazing.  Light, flat, comfortable to read, and will hold hundreds of books.  The screen is a type of technology that isn't backlit and only uses power when you turn a page...so the battery lasts for days.  You do need ambient light, as you would for a real book, but the device does have an accessory plug for a little reading light.

Best of all is all the ways you can get books on it.  This device is a cell-phone type appliance.

There are thousands of free classics on Amazon, and even current hardcovers are available at paperback prices.  They are beamed via wireless to the Kindle in seconds, once you register your device with an email address and serial number.

I installed a free PDF to Kindle converter on my laptop and then dragged the converted file to the Kindle using USB.

You can zip a doc file and email it to your kindle and it will show up on the device in the proper format.  There is a 15 cent/MB charge for this.

You can send a doc file as an attachment to kindle and they will convert it for free and send it back...then you can drag it to the Kindle over the USB.  There is no charge for anything you do with the Kindle over the USB.

PDFs, Doc, HTML, Text...all can be used with the Kindle.

...and the absolute best thing is that I can take pictures of it with my Nikon digital SLR I got for Xmas.



Yeah, the picture could be better, but just I'm learning how to use this thing. Bugger off.