Amazon Kindle is season’s hot seller
This just may be the season’s hotest new gizmo… the Amazon Kindle… a paperback-sized e-book reader. While such gadgets have been around for a few years, this one has some new high tech improvements that Amazon hopes will do for digital books what the iPod did for digital music.
With a memory expansion card, you can hold thousands, plus hundreds of newspapers, magazines and even blogs.
Here’s the first neat thing about the Kindle… the readility of the screen. It uses something called e-ink. There’s no glare, even in daylight. It’s as close to reading ink on paper as you can get on a screen.
But what really makes the Kindle stand out is its wireless, high speed access to the Internet… from anywhere… at no additional cost.
It connects to a special Kindle area on the Amazon website where… for less than $10… you can download any one of the tens of thousands of books available. It takes just a few seconds and… zap… the book is in your Kindle. You can have newspapers similarly delivered.
Reading on a Kindle is really pleasant. You change pages by pressing these buttons. You can also access a Web browser, search a free dictionary and free encyclopedia… bookmark pages, even type out notes or send your own documents to the Kindle.
It takes about an hour to get used to using it… after that, it’s just like reading a regular book. And the battery really lasts. I’m about all the way through one novel and have been using this heavily for five days now and still don’t need to recharge.
My one big criticism is the cost– $399. But it must it not bother too many people because it’s sold out several times since it was introduced a few weeks ago. If you’re a book lover… you’ll love the Kindle.
