Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

Features

I’ve already told you about Font Size, Go to Location, Search, wireless, and touched on the Amazon.com store. But my favorite feature of the Kindle is the built in dictionary! Used to be, if I didn’t know a word but could get enough out of the context, I would continue on unless it was a REALLY unusual word. But now I point the cursor at a word and the New Oxford American Dictionary tells me what it thinks. Hurray!

Another great feature is that the Kindle opens any book to the last page you were on. Seems a simple thing but since I’ve been sampling a lot of books lately it’s been great. No need to find a dozen receipts to use as bookmarks! Speaking of bookmarks, there is a feature to bookmark pages but I haven’t used it much yet. I think I remembered to use it once when I went hunting for something earlier in the book…

Highlighting text is kind of cool –just click around the phrase and the phrase you’ve highlighted not only changes shades of gray it also appears in a list on the main menu (complete with title, Location, and date). It’s great for saving neat quotes!

I played around at first with the text-to-speech feature. It’s pretty good (although it’s pretty funny when it tries sci fi and fantasy terminology) but I just don’t have a use for it right now. Maybe someday when I’m sick I’ll see how I like it reading to me.

On the other hand, I love the iPhone app for the Kindle! It syncs with my Kindle and opens to the last place I read; when I go back to my Kindle it resyncs and again picks up where I left off on the iPhone. The one major drawback is it only works for books I got directly from Amazon.com. Even the things I sent for translation to Amazon don’t show up on the iPhone’s list of books. Boo, hiss. I really like having my library in my purse for emergencies—or just for waiting rooms. If I complained about flipping pages too much on the Kindle – yeah, the iPhone’s even worse. But for a quick read, it’s fine.

To wrap up the features section, I’ll just mention two features the Kindle DOESN’T have: color and a clock. I think lack of color is the second main reason I don’t use the Kindle for web surfing if I can help it (the first reason being the difficulty of using a cursor rather than a mouse). Also, I would really like to see the book covers in color. It’s such a small thing to miss that it doesn’t bring my overall review of the Kindle down any; when I go shopping for the next e-book reader, however, I’ll likely wait to get one with color. As for the clock, I’m torn. Part of me says a digital gadget ought to have a clock. The other part of me wonders why on earth I’d want to pollute my reading experience with a timekeeper! Give a hoot, don’t pollute…

New Content

This is the really addictive part of the Kindle! It’s a device I pick up and always have good things to read. Click a button and 30 seconds later my new book is ready to read: I love wireless! At first I was concerned (I was petrified! Thinking I could never live without you by my side…wait, that started with “afraid”) that I would either spend a bunch recreating my library or that I’d only use the Kindle for brain candy. Not so! I’ve found several sources for free books (Amazon store available directly on the Kindle, Project Gutenberg, Baen.com) and found that older books tend to be cheaper than new. You can also email documents to Amazon for translation into a Kindle format.

On the other hand, not all books are available digitally– ESPECIALLY the older-but-still-copyrighted books. There’s a few of my books in storage (heh, almost wrote ‘stowage”) that I had a sudden urge to read and thought – no problem! Download! But alas, it was not meant to be. I clicked on the Amazon “tell the publisher” button, but who knows when that will bear fruit.

Another thing you can download from Amazon is book samples. Similar to the main webpage, many books have the first chapter or two available for free to decide whether you like the book. So far I’ve bought two books based on samples…and decided not to buy about ten.

So what’s on my Kindle? No, you don’t get the full list, but here’s a taste of the 33 items:
On Basilisk Station – David Weber (free, on shelf)
Chalice – Robin McKinley (bought, not on shelf)
My Man Jeeves – PG Wodehouse (free, not on shelf)
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (free, not on shelf)
Eragon – Christopher Paolini (bought, not on shelf)
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde (bought, not on shelf)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (free, not on shelf)
The Art of War – Sun Tzu (free, not on shelf)
Whose Body? – Dorothy Sayers (bought, on shelf)
Soulless – Gail Carriger (bought, not on shelf)
The Marvelous Land of Oz – L. Frank Baum (free, used to be on shelf as a kid)
The Lark and the Wren – Mercedes Lackey (free, on shelf)
Mutineer’s Moon – David Weber (free, on shelf)

And I still have 1,472 MB free.

Reading

Overall, I’m happy with the text presentation: it feels more like reading ink on paper than pixels on a screen. I haven’t had any problems in bright light (except for a slight screen glare in bright, offset light) or reading in the car. I really like being able to change the size of the text – a couple of times when my eyes it was a relief to crank up the font.

One downside is that with the font size I’m most comfortable with there are 20 lines per page. Most of my paper backs have at least 25 lines and more commonly about 35 lines per page, so I’m flipping a lot more often on the Kindle. Somewhat surprisingly, that really screws with my sense of where things were in the book. I would have thought that I would calibrate to the pages of whatever format I’m reading, but on the Kindle I tell myself, “That was just a few pages back,” and then I page and page and page and page to find it again!

There is a Go to Location feature, but I haven’t found it useful yet since there is no standard number of locations per page (I just checked two books: one has 3/pg and another has 7/pg) and I just don’t associate the locations with the text. The Search feature, on the other hand, is marvelous! Type in a word or phrase and it gives you a list of results in two lines of context with hotlinks to the locations. Feels a bit like cheating, but who cares?

I’ve had my Kindle for about three months now, so it’s time for a review! I’ve posted a couple of comments on Facebook but I hadn’t really organized my thoughts yet. This started out as one post but I realized as I typed that I have a lot to say. Right now there are four parts: Reading, New Content, Features, and Human Factors. So…let the review begin…

We are officially no longer homeowners. The Fitzgerald House 1.0 has been sold, closing is done, the check’s in the mail. We’re renting the house back until February 20th.

The Fitzgerald House 2.0 is looking awesome. Closing date has been set for February 25th. Now to figure what to do in between the 20th and 25th…(the new owners can’t let us stay any longer. They have to move in.)

-Travis