7 Days of Kindle: Day 7: Experimental Features

Kindle offers three new cool features including a basic web browser, the ability to play MP3 files and text to speech. You can also e-mail yourself documents and PDFs and read it on your Kindle. I tried the feature and liked it a lot. It’s perfect for the commuter who doesn’t want to pull out their bulky laptop.

I liked their battery life and be sure to get the leather cover. It kept the Kindle clean and portable. There is the standard black leather but I am groovin for the purple leather cover, available at Amazon, which is delicious looking.

The result:
Would I get the Kindle right now? Maybe.

The portability factor is amazing. This is a HUGE selling point. I have to say that a few days down the line, I really miss it. And the only other piece of tech equipment I feel that way about is my iPod.

Prices just dropped to $299 but if Apple has taught us anything it’s wait for the next generation to get more features at a lower price. I love the convenience and the cool factor of the Kindle. But I really want the color screen and better navigation for the newspaper articles. I’ll be eagerly waiting for those features and then I’ll pounce.

7 Days of Kindle: Day 6: Blogs and Magazines

With over 6,325 blogs and growing, there’s a healthy list but once again you have to subscribe (average price $1.99) and much as I like popular blog Gawker, I don’t love it that much.

The magazine selection is slimmer, with 32 titles which are mostly business and technology. But hey, even Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (which seems somewhat odd considering the high-techie other selections) are here. At $1.49 a month, Time Magazine’s Kindle version is full-featured at a drastically reduced cost than their paper counterpart.

Green features
By now you realize I'm an avid reader. If you are green conscious at all, you realize that reading both newspapers or magazine causes problems for the environment. Sure we all recycle but I'm surprised more isn't made of the green benefits of using a Kindle. Also, not having to lug those ungainly magazines to the recylable bin is a good thing.

7 Days of Kindle: Day 5: More Books!

Using the Kindle makes reading even more addicting.

I find myself wanting to rush home, or anyplace quiet so I can switch the Kindle on and read more. Discipline is definitely needed. With Kindle's ease of ordering a book at Amazon's site, I find myself buying (or wanting to buy books) at a moment's notice.

For the record, I have bought Chris Anderson's "Free," Coelho's "By the River...," and Julia Cameron's "The Right to Write." I really want to buy Julia Child's "My Life in Paris." The sample was divine! But with only two more days left of the test, I have to pace myself.

Feature I fall in love with today: the gorgeous and whimsical screen savers which depict some of literature's greatest heros and heroines (including Jane Austen!). What a thoughtful touch!

7 Days of Kindle: Day 4: Travel and Portability

Hi everyone!

If you're wondering what happened to my 7 days of blogging, I'm here to say you'll still get them but they won't be successive. It's still going to be great, don't worry.

My blogging bonanza fell right in the middle of a trip to NYC for business. But all my travels has given me an opportunity to take the Kindle 2 out for a run in numerous conditions. I knew that the Kindle was going to save me a lot of space packing my usual books but I have to say that having it ready to read the newspaper and my several books, I think I've fallen in love.

I've taken it with me in a 12-hour car ride from Charlotte to NY, where I read USA Today and my latest Paulo Coehlo book, "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept." And it was AMAZING and easy reading on the NYC subways. I saw fellow riders admire my easy breezy reader. With its lovely leather cover, it fits easily and discretely in my bag.

I've come to realize that the Kindle is the ultimate travel accessory.

BTW, the feature I fell in love with today: The ability to zoom in on a photo.

7 Days of Kindle: Day 3: Books

And now...what the Kindle was truly created for: BOOKS!

Kindle offers 300,000 titles, which include almost all the NYT best-sellers and some public domain work such as The Art of War, Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare, which is free.

What I absolutely love is the fact that all books offer a sample, which can range anywhere from three to 30 pages, depending on the publisher. This try before you buy mechanism allows you to get a good feel for the book. Samples that need more pages include Julia Cameron's "The Right to Write." Three pages? Uh, no. But what was amazing was the sample from the book, "Strapless" at over 30 pages.

Prices are far less than their hardcover options and run on average from $4.99 to $9.99 per book. I wish they put the prices on the main navigation bar so you can see them before you have to click in each title. But specials abound and I don’t miss turning the pages the way I thought I would.

Features I love: include the fact I can resize the text in six directions which helps late at night, and I like the fact that the automated voice can read anything on the Kindle to you.
Features I dream of: a color screen, a volume button for the voice (it’s a tad low without earphones).

Feature that is most fabulous: The wonderful buy one get one free offers and all the other special deals Amazon offers for the Kindle. I bought Chris Anderson's new book, "Free" and got "The Long Tail" along with it. It's these kind of deals that make the Kindle the medium of the future.

I also was able to download the No. 1 NYT best-seller free, "Paranoid." It's a thriller, something I don't get a chance to read much of but at free, you can't beat the value. Somehow I already feel that the Kindle is making me a much more varied reader.

7 Days of Kindle: Day 2: Newspapers

At our recent fourth anniversary celebration of “Speaking Volumes” (Carolina Weekly Newspaper Group’s book club which I’ve been running since 2005) I shared with book club member and former librarian Felicia Lee (seen left with fellow book club member Lena Claxton) that I one of the first things I do after I open my eyes is read the New York Times on my BlackBerry. She seemed shocked. And possibly aghast.

My love for the NYT started when a substitute teacher during third grade teacher at P.S. 209 in Brooklyn cracked the code and demystified how to read the front page, pointing out that the top right corner above the fold was the lead story. From thereafter every Saturday night at around 10:45 PM, I remember going to the newsstand with my mom or dad, buying the Times and picking up some freshly made bagels and settling and starting to read the sections. It felt so exotic reading the Sunday paper on Saturday. Watching old school wrestling with the likes of Bruno Samortino added to the fare.

I was most curious what would reading newspapers on the Kindle be like.

Kindle offers 44 newspaper subscriptions with the majority (33) of them U.S. newspapers. National newspapers such as the NYT, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are here as are many the dailies in major cities but the southeast is sorely underrepresented. The only ones offered are from Atlanta and Richmond. But if you want to read the Shanghai Daily or Le Monde, you are in luck.

I’m in a bit of a sticker shock. To read the papers on the Kindle you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, which ranges from $5.99 for the Orlando Sentinel to a whopping $14.99 for the Wall Street Journal. The Times is $13.99. While there are whole conversations within the media industry to try to monetize their online content, most newspapers (except for the WSJ which started out and continues to offer a fee-based subscription online) are free. I can read the entire Sunday NYT online with my laptop for free. The good news is that they offer a two week trial. I sign up for the NYT, USA Today and WSJ.

Kindle’s electronic ink makes it very easy to read in both direct sunlight and shade. I would love it if they would consider adding a nightlight for easier reading in bed. But with the flexibility of changing the font to six different sizes, reading was easier.

The 6 inch screen is wider than my PDA, which makes reading even swifter. What I’m not crazy about is the way the newspaper publishers display their content. On my PDA, I can swiftly scan all the headlines and choose what I want to read. On the Kindle, the content is broken down into main headlines such as Front Page, National, International, Arts and so on. I use the new five-way toggle to skim the articles and I can clip the ones I want to read later, a handy feature. But I find this lack of navigation has me hitting the “Next Page” button again and again. The effect of this feature has me reading far more than just a few articles. After an hour, I feel like I’m incredibly well read.

7 Days of Kindle: Day 1

As an avid reader, geek and techie I couldn’t resist the offer to take the new Kindle 2, Amazon’s proprietary electronic book reader, for a seven-day spin. Having recently read the book, “Julie & Julia” – where author Julie Powell cooks every recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and blogs about it for 365 days, I felt like a week’s worth of blogging was not only doable but sounded like fun. As actress Amy Adams says in the movie version of “Julie & Julia,” ‘I have thoughts!’ And anyone who knows me knows I’m not scared of sharing them.
On Thursday, the package from Amazon arrived and I felt like it was Christmas in July. Though one should not, normally, judge a book by its cover, I like the details. The whimsical phrase on the side of Kindle’s box “Once upon a time…” suggests this will not be any ordinary technical gizmo.

My goal for the next seven days is simple: do all my normal reading on the Kindle and see how it compares. My daily reading diet consists of two daily newspapers, a dozen blogs and an array of four or five books at various stages – in addition to our book club’s monthly selection. To maintain this information influx, I use a combination of laptop, BlackBerry and lug around a duffle bag just for reading material. The idea of swapping those 10-pounds for the sleek convenience of the Kindle, which weighs 10.2 ounces, is exhilarating.

I plug in the Kindle overnight to make sure it’s fully charged and can’t wait until day 2.