Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
It also does PDF's (with reflow) and epubs, both with and without DRM.
Wireless means nothing to some folks.
I agree on the dictionary, at least for me. I always thought it was no biggie, but find myself using it a fair amount.
Searching & notes. A plus for some, no biggie for others.
|
I didn't think the wireless was a big deal when I decided to buy the Kindle. I didn't care about it at all. I figured they'd included it for the technophobes who were afraid of transferring their files via USB and people who worked on the road a lot or spent long commutes on transit. I'm not one of them. What I realized after I started using it is that it really changes the way I buy books for the better.
I do not buy books ahead of time. You wouldn't think this could be such a huge money-saver, but it is. I used to buy several books at a time so I'd always have something to read. The thing is, I was frequently wrong about what to buy. I'd start books and not finish them because I didn't like them that much. I'd buy a book I found interesting then not even start it because I'd moved on to something else. I would venture to say that at least 20-30% of my paper books are unfinished. I may be more impulsive than most, but that's a lot of wasted money. I didn't even really notice it until I got the Kindle and stopped doing that. I bought about 80 Kindle books last year. If my old buying pattern had held, I likely would have bought 16-24 more that I didn't read. That goes a long way towards paying for the Kindle right there especially when you consider I used to buy a lot of hardback new releases. The only unfinished purchased books on my Kindle are the ones I'm reading right now. I shop on Amazon's site and rather than buying a book I'm interested in, I send myself the sample. I only buy the book if I've finished the sample. There's a link at the end. I click that and I have the book within a minute. I don't have to dislodge the cat or put down my cup of tea. Unless I'm going to be out of the country, which is fairly rare, I have no reason to buy a book without reading the first chapter. It doesn't matter if I'm at home in my comfy chair, at the dentist's office or on a train. I'll have the rest of the book when I want it.
I can see why dictionaries don't seem like that big of a deal to a lot of folks. We all read a lot. Most of us have developed the skill of making an educated guess about words we don't really know through context and form. However, I find my reading experience is richer when I can look up the word. Sometimes it's even a word I know but I feel the author is using it in a more nuanced way. I can pursue that curiosity without breaking the rhythm of my reading. But I must say that part of the reason I was pretty set against buying a device that wouldn't let me search or do dictionary look up was that they seemed like such basic level features. You have computing power. You have books. You can harness that power to do more with the books than just showing you the pages. I thought a reader should try to be more than merely a storage system.