Amazon Kindle Review
After a few weeks of debating, last week I decided to go ahead and get the Amazon Kindle, the electronic wireless reading device. I read a lot, about a book a week of fiction alone. So, I was very interested in the Kindle for a number of reasons. I didn’t have any issue with purchasing a few books, and the old ones are around $2-$4, so the price is right. New books generally sell for $9.99, so I was looking forward to saving a few bucks. My initial impression was very positive. The screen is really easy to read, and being able to change the font size easily means anybody can be comfortable. The entire process of buying via either Amazon website or via Kindle bookstore was easy to use and worked quite well. I did send a document to have converted and sent to my Kindle for .10, and this worked okay. The formatting of documents for the Kindle is a bit confusing. They could have made it much easier to just give you a template that works and looks good. A few of the books I purchased did not look exactly right, with extra line spacing every so often, which is kind of suprising because you’d think somebody would look at it before making it available on the Kindle. My biggest complaints were with the device itself. It is way too easy to change pages, and when you see a lot of people saying that, I hope Amazon will listen. The Kindle has a small keyboard near the bottom, and the a small menu you can use for looking up words, making purchases, etc… I tried to get used to the Kindle, I really did…but it just didn’t work like I thought it should. My hope is that Amazon will read the feedback from lots of people with similar issues and design a device around it. In my opinion, they could make the keyboard on screen, since it is not used often anyway, so it would only show up when you needed it. They need to drastically change the page buttons, two simple arrows near the bottom of the device would have been fine. I think they went way overboard on trying to make the page turn feel like a real book. It’s actually a lot easier to just move your thumb down to the bottom to press a button (if one existed there!) and there would not be the issue of accidental page turning. I don’t really care about the other functions of the Kindle, I would have been fine if all it did was let me read. So, maybe I’m a bit strange, but if something is going to replace physical books, let’s make it extremely simple and keep it that way. If I wanted a PDA, I would have bought one. I am still amazed that the page turn issue did not come up in the design phase, unless those engineers don’t actually read, because it could have been fixed easily. I think you will see something similar come around soon, either from Amazon or someone else. The biggest hurdle in my opinion was the on screen reading, and the Kindle fixed that, it just went too far in other ways for me.
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