As if books weren’t wonderful enough already, Amazon has come up with a way to make them more portable. With the recent release of a product called “Kindle,” you can now take up to two hundred e-books with you wherever you go, but only lug around a machine less than the size of a paperback, at 10.3 ounces. I’ve seen steaks bigger than that!
Kindle is like a large Palm Pilot. You upload your e-book and then retrieve the information on the screen. But the thing is, the Kindle screen is special. It’s designed to display to look as much like real paper as possible – you don’t get the eye strain you can when you read from a regular monitor.
So, how do you go about using this marvelous machine?
First, you purchase one for $399.00. Right now, there is such a high demand, you have to get on a waiting list, but I imagine it will be easier in future. After you get your Kindle, you can go online right from your Kindle with no cords or wires and look at the over 110,000 titles that are currently available. You download whichever books you want, but if you’re not sure if you’ll like a certain title, you can also download just the first chapter, for free. If you decide it’s a keeper, you pay around $9.95 for the rest of the book, and it appears on your Kindle within one minute. Plus, this thing has a long lasting battery. You can read for a week without having to recharge.
There are no service fees, no system requirements, no quotas or minimums – nothing. When you want, you buy. When you don’t want, you don’t buy. And because this is completely independent from your computer, you don’t need special software or to hook it up to anything. You don’t even need to own a computer to use a Kindle – the wireless Internet connection it uses is called WhisperNet and works just with your Kindle, and you get everything you need when you order the machine.
I’ll admit, the start up costs seem a little high. $399.00 is a lot of money. However, if you’re getting books for $9.95 that you would ordinarily pay $20.00 for, you’ll build up a savings. Plus, the advantages of all that space saved – you can store 200 books in the same space as you’d use to store one. Not too shabby.
I don’t own a Kindle, so I can’t say any of this from personal knowledge. But I do have to say, this information is all pretty intriguing and I think I’ll be for finding out more about it.
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