Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Amazon Kindle

So for Christmas my dear husband got me a Kindle. I had initially poo pooed such a thing but then I saw the Barnes & Noble Nook and I got all hyped up on the fact that they said you could share books with your friends. I admit, I was coveting.

I then noticed that the Nook wasn't shipping for weeks after Christmas and then one day at ES's fencing class there was a mom with a Kindle. She spent a lot of time talking to me about it and how FANTASTIC Amazon has been. She also said that she and her husband could share books. Hmmm... wasn't that Nook's claim to fame? So I decided I should actually research digital readers! I know, novel concept (pun not intended)!

After researching the Kindle, the Sony and the Nook I decided the Kindle was the way to go. Apparently most of the book publishers were not actually going to allow B&N to share books on the Nook and if they did you could only share it once and for TWO weeks. Oh as if Blunoz or any of my other friends had time to read a book in less than two weeks! As long as the Kindles are linked to the same Amazon account, you can pass books back and forth, so yea I can't share with my friends but I can share with my husband (if and when he gets one of his own). The other thing I liked about the Kindle was that is actually has international capabilities. Now I don't plan to travel internationally but Blunoz is going to deploy in the next few years (no this is not imminent) and maybe I will get lucky and be able to go join him at an exotic port call, or maybe someday I will be nice and get him his own Kindle. :-) The funniest thing I read was that B&N released the information about the Nook so far in advance that Amazon was able to upgrade all the Kindle software to compete before the Nook was even released! The mom at fencing said all her software was upgraded automatically and without problems.

My MIL knew I was getting a Kindle for Christmas so she cut out an article she read in the newspaper comparing the Kindle to the Nook. Once again Kindle was on top. The one new thing this article told me was that it takes 3 seconds for the Nook to turn a page and 1 second for the Kindle. I think that would drive me CRAZY, but what do I know? :-) The other thing that article says is that yes, B&N lists more free books but the books they are listing Amazon also has as free but the quality is so low on them, Amazon doesn't count them as books (but they are available to download for free).

Once I got my Kindle I stumbled upon the Amazon Best Sellers in Kindle list and there is an RSS feed to it, so I added it to my Google Reader. I have downloaded some fantastic FREE books from this list! Such as Conspiracy in Kiev and Midnight in Madrid, neither of which are free now, but they were when I got them! :-)

So there you have it, my Christmas Present from Blunoz in a nut shell. :-) Thank you my dear husband. I LOVE it!

2 comments:

Tad Poluschka said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tad Poluschka said...

I was blog-surfing when the word "Kindle" jumped off the screen because, since Dec 1, I decided I'd get myself a Nook. But there were none to be had. Good, because I've continued to read and research. I'm going Kindle. And I think finding your blog was Providence lol. Gotta have it!