JUST BOUGHT A KINDLE

[jessTay]

Hey everyone!

I just bought a Kindle and still cannot believe it. The Kindle was the first ebook reader that caught my interest, probably back in May of last year. Then I found out Canadians couldn't order one!

So I waited around hoping an ebook reader would pop up that would have internet access. The new irex seemed like it would have it, but then announced that the new model would not include it for Canada and internationally.

Then I found out the Kindle was now available to order to Canada, and the internet feature would work. And it was now super cheap!

YAY

So this is my success story. Over half a year of hemming and hawing and finally I'm going to be the proud owner of my own reading device. Feels weird to spend so much money on myself.

Can't wait til Jan 20th!

[daffy4u]

Congratulations jessTay! While you're waiting for you new Kindle to arrive, check out the links in my sig for some fun things you can do with your Kindle.

[desertgrandma]

welcome to MobileRead, jessTay.

Definitely cick on Daffy's links, and here is another page to give some help.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custom...deId=200375430

[SensualPoet]

Hey, Jess! I'm in the GTA myself. (I can see Queen's Park from my porch! LOL)

Kindle 2 is pretty amazing for what I want to do -- read books. I bought mine mid-November and it's already been to Mexico and back.

There is so much public domain content that makes ideal reading for me, I still haven't bought anything directly from Amazon. Plus, as I am discovering, it is ridiculously easy to "roll your own" doing very simple global formatting with Word and running it through a Mobi maker. The content here on Mobileread, and a few of the easily discoverable "usual suspects", opens up a lot of stuff to read.

And one thing you may like is, as a Canadian resident, Life+50 author rule applies to you. So, if you like mysteries, Dorothy L Sayers and Raymond Chandler are PD for you. A number of titles have turned up in the .mobi section here.

Have fun when the Kindle arrives! (Charge it first ... it takes about an hour.)

[carlobee]

Congratulations on your purchase!

Also, welcome!

[kennyc]

Congratulations! It's a great reader!
Lots of great people, information and books here!

[pboss]

Congrats Jess! Let us know when you get it. It's fun to follow the Kindle route from start to finish. Keep us posted.

[WT Sharpe]

Hope you like yours as much as I like mine.

[jessTay]

thanks for the replies and the links! Sensual Poet, that's cool you are from Toronto as well. My dad works by Queen's Park.
I'm out of the city myself, except for when in North York at the uni. What's the annotation function like for word docs? I have to edit a lot of them for Creative Writing workshops.

I can tell it's going to be a money saver. Already I found a complete set of everything James Joyce has written for $3. I'd probably have to spend at least 30 in the york bookstore. So far costs have been cut by 90%! Yay

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by jessTay

What's the annotation function like for word docs? I have to edit a lot of them for Creative Writing workshops.

The Kindle 2 is optimized for reading. Adding notes, clipping content, etc. is possible and fine for casual use; it's not designed for hard core academic use. The keyboard and tools are good enough for the basics but I think you'd go squirrley expecting the same sort of control you'd have with a laptop or netbook.

But let us know your experience!

[ficbot]

I am in the Toronto area and I have a Kindle as well that I just got about a week ago. I love it! I got it because I wanted the text to speech feature so I could listen to my books at the gym and then resume reading them at the same spot when I got home. The Kindle has been just perfect for me. I am about to post a thread about our winter meet-up, I hope you will come.

[fugazied]

Congrats and welcome to the Kindle community!

It shouldn't feel weird spending that much money on yourself, you deserve it and will get a lot of enjoyment out if it

[jessTay]

ARRIVED!!!!! One day early! SOooo glad I bought the case too. More info to be posted!

[Sydney's Mom]

Congratulations! Please post your reactions-love to hear them!

[jessTay]

Sooooo

First Impressions:

-> Very light. Not a surprise there. Keyboard much smaller than I imagined. For some reason in the pictures it looks much clunkier and less sleek.
-> Cover is wonderful. Love how easy it is to bend back, the quality all of it.
-> Sooo easy to use. I don't know if this is just because I'm too used to doing everything with technology, but I didn't even really have to look at the manual unless I had specific things I wasn't figuring out. I plugged her in, charged it, and was ordering James Joyce in about a minute.
-> I have a slide texting keyboard on my cellphone so I feel like the keyboard is already second nature to me. Not hard to get used to AT ALL.

Things to still figure out:

-> I've got calibre going now, which is great. I haven't tried the free Kindle word doc conversion service which I'm very interested in. Hopefully that'll work out nicely. I did convert one of my stories from word doc to txt (just copying and pasting), and it was neat to see my own words on the screen.
-> While I know that the small screen isn't the best for pdfs, I wanted to use it for short stories at least. I put on three short stories I have to read for class, but because of the really bad scanning in (still left huge black spaces around where the book was scanned in; the teacher probable just did it herself), it was really hard. I still need to figure out how to crop pdfs. It'd be cool if I could somehow divide them into two images so then instead of two pages at a time, it'd be one, but I'm not sure how to do this so far. There must be a way.

Content:

-> Downloaded a bunch of James Joyce for 3 as I was saying earlier. Fast, easy, amazing.
-> Downloaded the 14-day trial of The New York Times Literary Supplement . Interesting to read on the bus, even though it distracted me from Timothy Findley which I have to read for class. Paper just isn't as fun as playing with something so brand new!
-> While waiting for class, chilling with my friends, we decided to see if any of our creative writing profs had ebooks. I doubted it since it's Canada and most of them, while award winning, aren't huge selling. No dice. But, wonderfully, Steven Galloway who is from B.C. and teaches at UBC had two ebooks available to download. And he's awesome. One book I already had in paper copy, I downloaded the other. Amazing to just start reading it in seconds. Soooo a solid A for Contemporary Canadian literature. It would've gotten an A+ if it had my profs' books.

Biggest problems:

-> NOT SPENDING ALL OF MY RENT AND FOOD MONEY ON EBOOKS!
-> Does the next page button wear out for anyone? For some reason, I feel like if I press it too much, it's just going to get looser and looser.

And those are my first impressions! Thank you and good night!