Skip to main content

Kindle review

This review will be short and sweet.  I like practically everything about this device.  It's light, it's fairly tough, it's intuitive, the battery lasts forever, it holds thousands of books, and most importantly it's very easy to read.  I've read three books on it so far and it's pretty much identical to paper.  I find computer screens a bit taxing after a couple hours, but the e-ink technology makes for excellent contrast and the lack of backlighting is very easy on the eyes.  The pdf support is a trifle rickety, but especially as you can switch the layout from portrait to landscape it's possible to get reasonable font size even on small scanned pdfs.

Basically my only complaint—like most devices these days—is the annoying DRM gateways that they put up to try and lock you into the Amazon service.  It doesn't support EPUB, for example.  It's not that much of hassle even for the marginally computer literate like myself to convert your books to the proper format and avoid most of these problems.  (I've found the free software Calibre works very well for me.)  Certain features cannot be unlocked until the Kindle is registered, but I can't register it yet as I don't have Wi-Fi.  Regardless, these are minor issues, and they mostly irritate me as they're likely to affect only those that would have bought from Amazon anyway.  Overall, highly recommended.  I may never buy another normal book.

Comments

  1. Did you get the one with 3G or the wifi only one?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, good question. I got the wi-fi one, I believe the price was $140. I think the 3G model is $190.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, I'm going to be a PC volunteer in Ghana, and I'm contemplating buying a Kindle. Do I need to load it up entirely before I leave, or can I download books using the wi-fi in Ghana? You may not know about other areas outside of South Africa, but what has been your experience? Is there any reason to get the 3G model? Does it make a difference in your current situation?

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you can find wi-fi in Ghana, you'll be able to download stuff. So far I've used my computer to download things and then transferred via the cable. I reckon you'd be able to find some way of getting books in Ghana, but I'd probably spend some time loading it up in the US because it'd be pretty easy to get months worth of material without trying very hard, and then you'd be set in case you can't get things to work in Ghana for some reason.

    I don't see much reason for getting the 3G model personally--there's no way I could really take advantage of that here in any case. To me it seems like a waste of money in that it's mostly a matter of convenience, and it's quite easy to get enough material on the Kindle for it to be self-sufficient for months or years. I'm no expert on Ghana, though.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks so much--this really helps. I don't know why I thought I'd need the 3G, but it makes sense that even back in the states, I probably won't need it. And it makes the overall price of the Kindle much more reasonable. I just have to resign myself to the fact that I'll have to spend $10 for each book I put on it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, that's not strictly necessary. You can find cheaper ebooks than Amazon on the internet, and Project Gutenburg has gotten pretty good with their formatting for anything published before 1923. I use calibre to manage my collection, which keeps everything in the right format.

    There's also pretty much everything via torrents and so forth for free, but I know that's not for everyone. You can find stuff that way that simply isn't available any other way, though.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that