My New Amazon Kindle 3: Day 1
I bought a Kindle yesterday. I have been toying with the idea of buying an ebook reader for a couple of years now, but it hasn’t been until the last couple of months that I have really considered it. Over the last couple of years, I have built a small collection of ebooks, some that I bought from Amazon, others that I have downloaded the internet. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and tend to re-read series that I like, so I have been gradually replacing my paperback collection with ebooks and reading them on either my iPod Touch or my Windows Phone 7.
Earlier this month, I started a new job with a longer commute, and decided that I needed a way to carry multiple books with me on a device with enough battery life that i wasn’t constantly having to charge it all day long like I was with my cell phone. Essentially, I was looking for a device that did the following things:
- Enough battery life for multiple days of reading
- Ability to read ebooks available from my library
- Ability to easily add my personal library of ebooks onto it
- Preferably able to read .epub format
- Able to read my previously purchased Kindle books
No device right now does all of these things. I was looking at the Kindle 3, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and the Sony PRS-350. The last two both support epub and ebooks from my library, but only the Kindle will display the 25 books I already purchased from Amazon. After about a week of research and waffling back and forth, I finally decided to buy a Kindle. I have already made a significant investment in books from Amazon, and I trust them to stay in the ebook business longer then either Sony or Barnes & Noble. Also, Amazon announced that later this year they will support Adobe Digital Editions, so I should be able to download ebooks from my local library onto the Kindle. Plus, the Microsoft Store was offering a free cover and light with the purchase of a Kindle, so I saved $60 on that.
I have had it for 24 hours, and am happy with my purchase so far. I bought a couple of new books from Amazon yesterday and the reading experience has been better then on my phone, although maybe not as much as I had thought it would be. The text is definately crisper on the Kindle, so I am sure I will have less eyestrain in the long run. I converted several ebooks from epub to .mobi format using Calibre and e-mailed them to my Kindle e-mail address, and they showed up within a couple of minutes, which is a significantly easier process then what I was doing to get ebooks onto my phone. Hopefully, Amazon will offer .epub support in the future so I don’t have to convert every book in my collection to .mobi.
My only real complaint with the Kindle so far, isn’t even about the Kindle. Publishers have Kindle book prices way to high. One of the books I bought yesterday, was released yesterday on Kindle for $15.99 and in hardcover for $17.99. I seriously debated buying it, and I probably would not have if I hadn’t just bought the Kindle and was looking for new books to put on it. I could have bought the hardcover at Barnes and Noble, read it, and sold it back to my local used book store for half price and saved a lot of money. The numerous benefits of an ebook reader don’t outweigh the price of purchasing a book, and publishers better figure out a fair pricing model before they run into the same problems the music industry did a decade ago.
