Not to light a fire but to help me get familiar with a recently acquired Kindle ebook reader. I call the process of learning about the Kindle – Kindling.
I had tried working with my Ipad but found that it is still to heavy for regular prolonged reading where you have to hold it in both hands. The ipad excels in high quality graphical reading such as newspapers and books but for recreation and plain old reading it falls short of the mark for me. The process of setting up the Kindle was eased by me already have a working Amazon account to associate with it. And a quick review of the devices web page allowed me to add a number of email address to be able to send documents from. The results were a mixed bag and some pdfs were reported as problems.
The text to speech was a bit of fun but still reminds me of the stilted earlier version that occasionally mangled words. The reading contrast on the device is great – especially outdoors.
I suspect that most of its use will be recreational reading but I will be interested in seeing what it makes of heavier duty manuals. The whispernet service caught me a bit by surprise as I went for the 3G version and was bombarded by messages saying that the files I was sending were too large for the allowance I had set. I am glad there is an allowance otherwise I would have incurred quite a cost for downloding across the Whispernet 3G link. I amended the settings to use the yourname@free.kindle.com email address that you get as part of the setup(you also get yourname@kindle.com for the whispernet link) so that larger files go via a wireless link and cost nothing.
One worth watching out for.
So far the device is proving great at giving a simple clear display for the test documents I am using . It will be more interesting to see it in operation in anger on holiday and with more important documents.
Off to find a decent set of ebooks to trial.