Amazon Kindle
I got the Amazon Kindle 2 yesterday. I was thinking of spending a week or so before writing this small, first-impressions review, but I figured that a week is way too much. You simply don’t need a whole week to settle on an opinion regarding reading on the Kindle.
You remember when I said, in an earlier post, that the Mac OS X is wheel re-inventing? that wasn’t literal. Don’t get me wrong now, I love my Mac. But I was exaggerating a bit, because, though it is clever, it’s not re-inventing. However, reading on the Kindle (now literaly) is wheel re-inventing. People may disagree, but I never thought of the day in which reading from a screen would best a book. The electronic paper display for the Kindle is a mystery to me; I have no idea how it functions, but it looks (and feels) like a goddamned book. If you’re an avid reader, you already know the feeling when you spend a lot of time reading texts from a computer screen. Yes, it gives you headache, for several reasons I won’t bother mentioning. But reading from this e-paper is unbelievably incredible. It’s just natural. I really don’t miss my paperbacks. I’m sorry, paper sellers, but Kindle has won the compition.
When I first considered buying a Kindle (back when Amazon announced their first one), it wasn’t because I thought that regular books aren’t good. Oh, no. Regular books are destined to live a better life than you. But what got me into buying it is the sole fact that I’m running out of shelf space. Oh my poor, poor shelves. Just how games eats up all the RAM; books eats up all the space you have. I didn’t want my room to turn up like my aunt’s, where even under her bed and closet you could find several books thrown here and there and, literaly, everwhere. Buying contents for Kindle is a smooth, shelf-saver operation. I know you already know this, but the fact that you could carry thousands of books (and magazines and newspapers) in the palm of your hand is simply… astonishing. Do you know what thousands of books means? It means no room for my action figures and Mega Man posters to be seen, and that’s a non-negotiable crime in my little kingdom (or as known as, my room). What’s better than quitting a book to read a said article you just remembered in The Wall Street Journal, and by the time you finish it you can delve straight back to the last word you were reading in your book? No poundaries, no nothing. It’s that simple. I just think that I’ll be going to work on Sunday with my favorite newspaper, favorite magazine and my recently-purchased books, all without compromising space or looking wierd, and that makes me grin happily.
All the buttons on the device are dead simple. You have a button to flick to your next page, another to go back a page, a home button (which brings all your items, as seen above), a menu button, which brings a list for options you could do (such as searching your books, playing your MP3s, starting the text-to-speech feature, and so on), a back button, which functions like a “back” button in Firefox, and finally a 5-way controller which acts like a d-pad, choosing stuff and so on. It’s so simple that you don’t need to read the included manual to understand all of this, though I did, because I’m addicted to reading manuals. I think they’re fun. But yeah, it’s really simple and gets the job done.
There are a lot of small things you can do while reading a book that, when combined, would show the very big potential the Kindle is promising. Obviously, when you feel like you don’t wanna go through another page, just leave it there and let your Kindle go to sleep. You can even read another book(s) then return to the first one and voila, you get to the last page you were reading. If you came across a word that is riddling, you can use the 5-way controller to locate the word in the Oxford dictionary. This will not interrupt your reading; the definition will look like a footnote at the bottom of the page, and you can continue reading normally. However, if you feel like exploring more of the word’s meanings, you could press “Return” from the keyboard and it will bring you the dictionary in all its glory. This is a very, very neat idea to implement in the Kindle, and will make a lot of readers happy, to know that they could read anything, even those hard-to-read classics, without getting the “owhellno” feeling.
There’s a lot to talk about here, but I only spent a little time with my Kindle and I haven’t tried everything yet. I really think that the Kindle is one of the very few things that will alter the way I live my ordinary, boring life. I just can’t go back to reading books again. This is way better than I expected. I don’t care how, just get it and thank me later.
