New from Puzux - playable crossword and Sudoku puzzle books launched this week bring interactivity to Kindle users.

The crossword and Sudoku puzzles are sold through the Amazon Kindle store (search for Puzux), where users can purchase books that link to puzux.com. There they can try sample puzzles for free and fill in, save, return to, and get hints on any of the puzzles they’ve purchased. The books range from 99c to $1.99, and should keep those lucky enough to receive a Kindle this season entertained for many hours of solving fun.

I bought one of the Sudoku books. You have to turn on web-browsing and follow a few instructons to get it to work, but it isn't hard and the puzzles work great. They use javascript to get the puzzles to work, and personally I thought is was a wonderful idea. It also proves the concept that the Kindle could be used for more than just reading books.

A NICE and very interesting step forward, but I already get 365+ puzzles/year from the NYT for $40/yr and the Puzux looks to run about $73/yr based on 5-puzzles per "book". So, for now I will just stick to "solving" (and I use that word very loosely...heh heh.. ;)) the NYT puzzles on my Clie or N800 for almost half the price per year.

And with that annual Premium Crossword subscription you get access to over 5,000 puzzles. So all ya need do is download the whole archive (sadly one puzzle at a time...d'oh!!) for nearly the past 10yrs+ resulting in enough puzzles to last the rest of your life and beyond. After that eh, renew or not, I mean it's not like ya don't have enough puzzles using this method. I don't care about the puzzles all being current (helps the memory to work decade old puzzles usually with clues about current events for the time)...all that matters is Will Shortz is an evil, evil man!! :)

BTW, I have read rumblings of another device maker might be working on adding a crossword puzzle app to their device...only I sense theirs is going to support the NYT .PUZ (Across Lite) format puzzles.