Are e-readers still too underdeveloped to be worthwhile?

Miyazaki

the kindle 3 can read .pdf documents, which can be sent to the kindle itself. So technically speaking, you don't need to buy off the amazon store at all.

Sonic67

From Micro Mart 23-29 September, article, Has Amazon already won the E-book war?

A few figures:

Last July Amazon confirmed that sales of its Kindle format e-books had overtaken sales of 'physical' hardcover books for the first time and that it sold three times as many Kindle books in the first half of this year than in the first half of 2009.

More recently Steig Larsson of Millennium Trilogy fame became the first author to achieve combined sales of one million electronic books on Amazon US, with James Patterson following closely on 900,000 copies.

This Christmas e-book readers will also drop below the psychological £100 barrier.

At the end of August Amazon's Kindle E-book reader officially shipped to those who had pre-ordered it in July. It sold out within a couple of weeks of it being announced.

The launch coincided with the UK Kindle store with hundreds of thousands of books on sale and tens of thousands of classics.

It was first announced in the US on 19th November 2007. The first generation model sold half a million in its first year. It's been one of the top selling items in Amazons electronics section ever since.

There are also numerous other products available. There's Sony's range, the Barnes & Noble's Nook, and Borders Kobo and many others.

The advantage of the Kindle is that you don't need a computer to use it once you have set up your Amazon account. You can use a free wireless connection to the Kindle store. The latest generation of Kindle can come with wifi and 3G. So where ever you are in the world you can get your digital newspaper or magazine.

Also included is features like putting notes, highlights and comments to Twitter or Facebook without a computer.

Amazons reader software is also available for iPhone, PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android and iPad. An advantage of MP3 is you can play it back on various devices. Now with the Kindle format you can read your purchased book on up to six devices. If you upgrade, you deregister the old device and re-register the new one. As long as the total is less than six they can all be used.

Whatever magic the iPad can perform it can not download free e-books directly while the Kindle can.

Part of all this is that you can read Kindle books on your phone and then later get an e-reader for below £100 to then read them properly on. It's a similar move that the iStore uses. Buy music for your PC get an iPod later.

Going back to Steig Larsson his three books are £7.99 in paper form. £2.50 to buy. Add free books as well, plus a subscription to the Evening Standard, £3.99 a month, and it becomes cost effective.

Theydon Bois

It can, I just downloaded Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Sonic67

Interesting, the article says that the Kindle can download books directly from the web with its built in browser. With 'Kindle For iPad' the iPad needs iTunes and a computer to download books.

Theydon Bois

To clarify I did this within iBooks, not the Kindle app.

Ian J

If you check the user ratings on Amazon for the newspapers you will see that there are a lot of complaints about the lack of content with people saying that it isn't worth the monthly subscription.

I haven't read the reviews for all newspapers but would guess that they are pretty much the same

Pecker

Yes, I've read that.

But the bits that are missing (the colour pics, magazines, etc) tend to be the bits I don't read anyway.  I usually just read the main news articles.

I think that if I took a newspaper daily I wouldn't want to swap the 'real' version for the Kindle version, but I suspect it'd be fine for 2 weeks on holiday, just keeping up with what's going on in the world.

Steve W

Ian J

I think that you get a two week trial anyway

Peridot

From what (little) I understand you can use calibre software to download content from newspaper sites and synch to the Kindle free of charge.

I've just ordered the 3G one but will have to wait until December to enjoy it as it's my birthday pressie from Mrs Peridot. Wanted to get it ordered in case stocks run low towards Christmas.

The internet connectivity, albeit limited, will cover a lot of the purposes I currently have to take a laptop with me, so losing the weight of this and the books I'm reading on my daily commute will do my back the world of good

mike7

I've had a Kindle for about a week and can confirm that it does what it says on the tin, and a bit more. Of course it is not something I would use for heavily illustrated books. Pictures are in monochrome, but can be zoomed to fill the screen. The maps in a guide book are perfectly useable. As a  dispenser of novels it is superb. I don't think you can compare it with the i Pad, that's a completely different animal designed for a multitude of purposes and, after all it's six times the price of a Kindle.

Free books abound and its nice to read the old classics again. Some material is also available for just a few token pence. Current releases cost pretty much what you would pay for a paper version even allowing for the fact that e-material is subject to VAT. Books look nice on the shelf, if you have the space, but most are now printed on paper that goes yellow after a couple of years.

The connection features on the Kindles (wireless and 3G) are amazingly well designed. No fiddling about with passwords and web connections, you just click on 'go to Amazon shop' and there you are. No need to plug it in to a PC. With the 3G connection, which is permenantly free, you could be in the middle of a field and download the latest blockbuster in under a minute. It really works, which is more than can be said for a lot of gear these days. You can download a free sample of 6 or so pages, although this cannot compare with flipping through a book in a shop.

Your purchase is confirmed by an email to your PC and if you set up the Kindle store on your PC all the books you buy go there as well and can be accessed which is a useful back-up. Everything is set up for you to access your Amazon account. All you need to key in is your wireless broadband code.

The Kindle has an 'experimental' section which is for new facilities under development. Currently you can go on the Web in the conventional sense, but obviously with limitations. Don't expect too much. Mine is also playing MP3s whilst I read, from its stereo speakers. This leads me to another point. If I'm feeling lazy it will read out loud to me, albeit with an American accent (male or female). Power is not a problem as, once charged, it should run for a month assuming that the wireless link is only switched on when downloading.

OK the keys are a little small, but people are quite used to Blackberry sized buttons, and you don't need them except to search. I've not loaded anything from other sources yet but Calibre (free) seems to offer is more than I'll ever need.

How else are you going to carry up to 3000 books in a device that is hardly as  big as the average blockbuster paperback?

Edit: If you want to try the Kindle experience then download the 'Kindle for PC' option from the Amazon Website. This gives you an idea how easy it is to download books and read them. You will need to have an Amazon account. Free books are billed as £0.