Kindle, oh Kindle
Somehow I was one of the lucky few to get one of the precious Kindles before Christmas. After using it for a couple of months now, I am finally ready to provide my feedback on it.
The week before the Kindle was announced I picked up the Sony Reader and had gotten a feel for what an e-Ink reader was capable of achieving. I was a little hesitant at first about getting another book reader so soon but after seeing the amount of titles available in the Amazon store I was ready to plop down another $400. When the Kindle launched it had over 88,000 books available. The Sony store only had about 22,000. Amazon had a familiar and intuitive interface. The Sony was painful to use. Amazon is compatible with any OS and the Sony is Windows only. As an added bonus, the prices on Amazon seem slightly lower than Sony. These prices are usually always lower than the price of a physical copy of the book.
I didn’t place my order instantaneously, but after an article came out touting the virtues of the Kindle, I became convinced. Somehow, my Kindle was miraculously shipped the next day. (I like to think that all my years of devotion to Amazon and Amazon Prime had something to do with it. Alas it was not so. An order placed the next week did not ship before Christmas.)
To begin with, the Kindle arrived in a beautiful package shaped to resemble a book. Compared to the plain old packaging of the Sony Reader, this was a nice pleasant touch. The package included a nice leather cover and elastic strap to hold the Kindle within. Unlike the cover on the Sony, the Kindle could be easily inserted and removed from the cover. The leather itself was much softer.
