hmatt's blog

I have wanted a Kindle for some time now, the thought of all of my books at my fingertips..

Well, when I received my tax refund it was time. I purchased it on April 3 and to my surprise, it arrived two days later.

Since then my commute hasn’t been as terrible. It takes me an hour to get to work each morning, but now I simply turn on the read-to-me feature and my books are read aloud! I had been downloading audiobooks, but I missed taking down notes and highlighting.

Occasionally I try to keep up on kindle news and I recently discovered that Amazon will soon allow kindle to check out digital e-books. Nifty!

So in a nutshell, here is what I like about my kindle:

– able to read outside in the sunlight (unlike my iPhone)
– battery life lasts a LONG time
– can make notes on the book and highlight (also release my notes to others and see other’ people’s highlights.
– it READS ME THE BOOK (so incredibly awesome)
– I can read the same books on my iPhone anytime (yay whispersync!)
– it makes sampling and buying books so easy

Little annoyances to an otherwise incredible device-
– can’t bookmark while being read to (would be useful when driving to come back to later make notes)
– ‘page numbers’ are only visible when pressing the Menu key (same reason as above)
– there isn’t a way to get a book on the whispersync (would be useful for books I get from other places)
– when you download a sample and then buy the book it doesn’t automatically get rid of the sample (a small annoyance to be sure, but it makes the process one-step less elegant)
– the symbol selection screen doesn’t allow me to wrap around to the beginning
– plays aren’t as available on the kindle (at least that I haven’t found yet)
– sharing a passage on twitter only gives you a link
– notes are date-stamped automatically
– the ‘-‘ symbol is far away on the symbol list– if only it had a keyboard equivalent
– there is no way to easily organize my books. You can organize, but it isn’t as easy as simply creating a folder system on my mac

It would be great to join a book club I think. Unfortunately, my taste in books isn’t shared by most people around me (that I know of anyway). Perhaps someday a bookclub feature will be added someday

Useful keyboard shortcuts-

SHIFT+SYM – begin/stop reading aloud
Spacebar- pauses reading
ALT+SHIFT+H – screenshot (although I can’t view it until it is connected to a computer)

More shortcuts are available on http://3gooddogs.com/pub/Kindle3KeyboardShortcutsV1-8%20.pdf

Yay kindle!