Kindling
I just bought my first book for my new Kindle 2: Curse's Captive, by Jennifer Schwabach. I got the K2 last week, and loaded a couple of dozen azw-formatted books from ManyBooks. Loading the books one at a time is a bit tedious -- I'm hoping someone out there has set up zip files of all the public-domain works by a particular author, or in a particular field. Neither Project Gutenberg nor ManyBooks seem to offer such a feature, unless I've overlooked it. There are a few complete-works sets, but I haven't found any collections of works that were not at one time already compiled in print. So let me know where I should be looking!
I haven't spent a whole lot of time using the K2; mostly it's been taken over by my eleven-year-old daughter, who's now read many volumes of L. Frank Baum arcana -- the non-Oz books. That's the wonder of Project Gutenberg, of course -- books that have been out of print for a century and would otherwise be difficult to find and too expensive can now be rediscovered by and fascinate a new generation of children. And of the Kindle; for all the decades those works have been available online, we haven't actually read many of them at the computer.
That said, I'm not absolutely delighted with the Kindle. The Internet-access feature seems to be unavailable about half the time (and I live in a large city, so it's not likely to be a cell-network-availability problem). The combination of small screen and slow refresh rate means that every few seconds you have to interrupt your reading and wait for the next page to load. (Because of e-paper's slow refresh rate, at least in comparison to an LCD or CRT monitor, scrolling won't work either; I'm sure that's a priority for the K3.) The buttons are a little awkwardly placed for my thumbs, although they seem just right for the kids. And they're a little stiff, which makes me wonder how long they'll last.
The read-aloud feature is pretty cool, though. Let's hope it survives to the Kindle 3; some killjoys are already trying to get rid of it. [I could go into a side-rant about the Authors' Guild and the Google Books lawsuit here, but no.]
I haven't spent a whole lot of time using the K2; mostly it's been taken over by my eleven-year-old daughter, who's now read many volumes of L. Frank Baum arcana -- the non-Oz books. That's the wonder of Project Gutenberg, of course -- books that have been out of print for a century and would otherwise be difficult to find and too expensive can now be rediscovered by and fascinate a new generation of children. And of the Kindle; for all the decades those works have been available online, we haven't actually read many of them at the computer.
That said, I'm not absolutely delighted with the Kindle. The Internet-access feature seems to be unavailable about half the time (and I live in a large city, so it's not likely to be a cell-network-availability problem). The combination of small screen and slow refresh rate means that every few seconds you have to interrupt your reading and wait for the next page to load. (Because of e-paper's slow refresh rate, at least in comparison to an LCD or CRT monitor, scrolling won't work either; I'm sure that's a priority for the K3.) The buttons are a little awkwardly placed for my thumbs, although they seem just right for the kids. And they're a little stiff, which makes me wonder how long they'll last.
The read-aloud feature is pretty cool, though. Let's hope it survives to the Kindle 3; some killjoys are already trying to get rid of it. [I could go into a side-rant about the Authors' Guild and the Google Books lawsuit here, but no.]