The Amazon Kindle Electronic Reader Tips and Tricks.

"Kindle Electronic Reader with E-ink is a major breakthrough in screen AND wireless technology"
The worlds first device with fulltime Wireless Connection with no charge to be online! No minutes, subscriptions or contracts.

This summer, Oprah received a gift that she says changed her life.
"It's absolutely my new favorite favorite thing in the world," she says.

Meet the Amazon Kindle™, a wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 190,000 books, blogs, newspapers and magazines. Whether you're in bed or on the train, Kindle lets you think of a book and get it in less than a minute. Although the Amazon Kindle costs $359, Oprah looks at it as an environmentally friendly investment. "I know it's expensive in these times, but it's not frivolous because it will pay for itself," she says. "The books are much cheaper, and you're saving paper." New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases are $9.99 or as little as $2.40.

Best Price on Kindle Reader

Oprah winfrey with her Kindle Reader

Newsweek magazine article on the Kindle Reader

"This device will change the way we read, obtain, and pay for media forever. It is an idea whos time has come..."

"New screen technology is clear in ANY light."

Your favorite books, newspapers and magazines are downloaded automatically over a full time FREE wireless connection. No minutes to pay for to be online, get email or browse the mobile web.

Carry your word documents, jpegs and a few hundred favorite books. Easy to search and bookmark. No wasted paper or ink, this thing is GREEN!"

Technology Today

e-ink technology

Kindle and Sony Electronic readers and e-ink:

Electronic-book (or e-book) readers, including the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, use an electronic "ink" (or e-Ink) display to reproduce text. (The image at right shows a sample of the e-Ink technology. You can click on it for a closer look.) You move through a book by pressing a button to pull the next page from the device's electronic memory. Current versions are imperfect, but in recent weeks a leading print magazine; you, our readers; and several design and media experts have convinced me to follow this fascinating technology more closely.

The print magazine Esquire, which announced that its September issue will appear on newsstands with a battery-powered e-ink cover. Meanwhile, our test observations on the Kindle continue to draw readers and comments some eight months after we posted them. Last week, while attending Stanford University's Stanford Professional Publishing Course, I heard professor Paul Saffo urge magazine editors to embrace the Kindle and its ilk.....Another instructor, renowned product designer Bill Moggridge, told me the Kindle has streamlined his research process by allowing him to electronically highlight passages in books and download those excerpts to his computer, saving him hours of transcription time.

At Consumer Reports, we recently enjoyed a lecture from Bo Sacks, an expert on so-called Electronically Coordinated Information Distribution, who predicts that e-books will command a growing share of the print market. That will happen, he says, as the devices improve and as the downsides of printed paper continue—notably its escalating cost and its long-term environmental issues.—Paul Reynolds

Compair the Kindle Reader to the Sony Electronic Reader

Basic Comparisons:

The Kindle breaks away from previous electronic book readers by providing a large number of titles and a continuous network connection. $350 to $399
The Sony Reader is the closest comparable device prior to the Kindle shipped recently with a street price of around $300

Displays: The Sony Reader uses the same E Ink technology as the Kindle, which provides an extremely bright, low-glare display that can be read in direct sunlight and at varying angles. The displays on the Kindle and Sony Reader are both grayscale (4 shades of gray for the Kindle versus 8 shades for the Sony Reader), so books with complex illustrations or which require color won't work well or at all. Both devices have 6-inch diagonally measured screens that display 800-by-600 pixels at about 160 pixels per inch (ppi).

Dimensions:
The Reader is 6.9 by 4.9 by 0.3 inches (17.5 by 12.5 by 0.8 cm) and weighs 8 ounces (0.23 kg). The heftier Kindle is 7.5 by 5.3 by 0.7 inches (19 by 13.5 by 1.8 cm) and weighs 10 ounces (0.28 kg). The iPhone, which offers no built-in book-reading features - even reading email-delivered or Web-hosted PDFs is a chore - is smaller than both, at 4.5 by 2.4 by .46 inches (11.5 by .61 by .12 cm) and weighs in at 4.8 oz. (0.14 kg).

PC Linking:
Whereas both the Sony Reader and the iPhone require a computer (Windows for the Sony Reader, Mac or Windows for the iPhone), the Kindle doesn't require a computer at all. However, if you do want to load personal content or audio files, the Kindle mounts as a USB drive, and you can manually back up content or copy over new items in formats Kindle supports. (The Kindle is therefore the first electronic book reader that works with Unix, Linux, and variants.)

Expandability:
The Kindle features a Secure Digital (SD) expansion slot and a USB port. The Sony Reader has both, along with support for Sony's proprietary Memory Stick, while the iPhone has just USB connectivity. Amazon doesn't list Kindle's memory capacity, but elsewhere the company said that the Linux operating system that drives it and internal files occupy about 60 MB of 256 MB of internal storage. The Sony Reader has 192 MB; an iPhone a whopping 8 GB. The iPhone trumps the others here because it's designed to play audio and movies. With SD cards all can hold gigabytes of data.

Available Media:
The Sony Reader's online bookstore reportedly contains 20,000 titles.
Amazon said in its press materials it has over 88,000 books (including most New York Times best sellers).
You can also subscribe to many publications, like magazines and newspapers.

Periodicals. Amazon has so far signed up eight newspapers to provide daily delivery of versions tailored for online reading. The New York Times costs $13.99 per month; the Wall Street Journal is a mere $9.99 per month. Sony offers no periodicals. Amazon also lists eight magazines too, with prices ranging from $1.49 to $3.49 per month, including the online Slate and Salon, and print magazines Time, Fortune, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Nation. Also, inexplicably, Reader's Digest Express. This should expand rapidly to include most major publications. Why wouldn't they, they only have to make one digital copy and send it out a million times. No paper or ink involved.

Music. The Kindle doesn't have a music store per se, but it can play back unprotected MP3 files and Audible (.aa) files synced via USB. Amazon coincidentally launched a music store that sells MP3s without digital rights management (DRM) recently. The Sony Reader can play unprotected MP3 and AAC format files, but Sony provides no associated music store. The iPhone has access to all iTunes Store offerings, as well as any unprotected music files in MP3, AAC, and a few other formats. Because there's so little internal memory in either the Kindle or Reader, a cheap multi-gigabyte SD card would be necessary for either to play audio. The Kindle has built-in speakers, as does the iPhone; all three devices each have a headphone jack.

Blogs. Kindle's content offerings include the unique option to pay to subscribe to blogs that are otherwise free, including BoingBoing, with updates being pushed to the device. Sony offers no such option. The iPhone's monthly fee includes unlimited data over EDGE, so you don't pay an incremental cost for any additional Web page, blog, or email message.

Web Browser. Kindle has a simple one, best suited for text, so it shows wikipedia alright, but can access any Web page. There is no charge for browsing the Web on the Kindle. The Sony Reader has no browser.

Document and Media types supported:
The Kindle can view files that start out in (but must be converted from)- Word, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and PNG formats, but notably not PDF.

The Sony Reader can display Word documents saved in RTF format, along with plain text files and PDF files.

Re-download Policies. If you lose your Kindle or it breaks, you can simply re-download the library of stuff you purchased to a new one; Amazon's Unbox video store has a similar policy. Apple has a one-per-lifetime iTunes re-download policy for music you purchased, and there are additional conditions that apply. Sony's policy is is similar to Amazon's.

Network. The Kindle relies on Sprint's EVDO network to access online content. The Sony Reader must be synced via USB to load new content.

The Kindle is the first device available with high-speed network access and without a subscription fee or a recuring fee of any kind.
The cost of network use and data delivery is built into the price of each item you purchase or subscribe to. It's the first portable ebook reader that might have a shot because of how it marries legibility, a network, and a large library.

Problems and Limitations

While each Kindle has an email address, you have to a pay a 10-cent conversion fee for each document in one of several supported formats that you send to the address; formats include Word, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP. The fee is clearly to cover network delivery costs. You can email documents to a special address and receive converted files back to a non-Kindle address at no cost, and then copy those files over USB at no cost. (Audio files need to be copied instead of emailed, and don't require conversion.)

The Kindle can't read or convert PDF files. That's a baffling decision and makes it useless for reading Take Control ebooks and a vast amount of other content. The ability to handle HTML means a lot of people will be converting documents into HTML for portability (but a loss in legibility and features).

The Kindle lacks a well-developed Web browser, even though it has email and a keyboard. Though this seems a significant omission, the Kindle is really designed to be an ebook reader with a few extras, not a multi-purpose device, despite its cost and its cellular connection. Amazon could choose to make the browser better, but they could also choose to charge for Web access if so.

The kindle is just plain Ugly.. The sony looks pretty good.

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