Be Excellent To Each Other

It's worth bearing in mind that if you bought it, it'll be hooked up by default to your Amazon account - if you don't both use the same account, you'll need to change that.

Nice feature that, though.

I knew I shouldn't have asked for this for Xmas. My folks have bought me one but I can't use it until then and I want it know and if I hadn't asked for it then I could just buy one now and then play with it! Gah!

Buy one anyway and eBay it on Boxing day. HTH HAND

Tempting, very tempting.

But I now must be a responsible adult and not fritter my money away on gadgetry...

Tsk. Gaywood would have bitten. You're no fun

My fun is on hold for the next 18.5 years.

You wouldn't understand.

But you soon will

We would always recommend drinking it too alongside using it topically. BUT only the stabalised stuff, seen some amazing results from it.

As it turns out the one I ordered for my other half's birthday arrived today too. Popular 'gifts' it seems, these Kindles. I'm a bit miffed to learn that there is no way to gift books to people, though. I can either leave it registered to my account and buy some books on there or de-register it and buy a gift card or something. Seems a bit of an omission to not have any way to give specific titles as presents.

If we have two Kindles in the house, will we have to buy two of each book, or can we use my account for both? It'd kinda suck to have to buy everything twice, especially given the other drawbacks of not having a physical copy (I'm still getting one though... it's worth it for the lack of clutter!).

Yeah you can register multiple Kindles to your account so no need to buy everything twice.

Kinda sucks to have to explain everything twice, too

I concur about gifting books, but I suspect the ability to do so can't be that far away.

You can use up to five Kindle devices on a single Amazon account, including physical Kindles and the various client programs for PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc. If you read the same book at the same time, though, you'll need to disable the "sync where I am in the book" feature.

Unless you read at exactly the same pace

Awesome.

Cheers, fellas.

My Kindle has been dispatched and will be here tomorrow!

*bouncing with excitement*

Can I say, it's good to see you Starling. You've not been posting enough.

Thanks, chap.

Also - the Kindle has arrived! It's very lovely, though I don't go much on the keyboard, but then I don't plan to be using this too much I suppose, and it serves the purpose. Oddly, it feels a little heavy to me - I'm not saying it's heavy in itself, it just feels ever so slightly heavier than I was expecting.

Fo realz? I took the case off mine for the first time in a while last night and was shocked at how little it weighed. And mine's an old one - I can only assume yours weighs less.

K3 is crazy light, it's 240g.

Oh sure, it's well light, but I dunno, I (stupidly, I'm sure) expected it to feel as light as a feather or something.

Don't get me wrong it's not a complaint, and I'm loving it so far. Took it into work today and impressed a few colleagues.

I showed this to my friend at work yesterday. Being a typical woman, she's rubbish with gadgets, and at first started touching the screen and saying it wasn't working.

I then brought up the Kindle Store on there and showed her some books from one of her favourite authors. She finally got the hang of how to move the cursor around, and promptly clicked on "buy now" against one of the books.

Luckily, seems Amazon have taken this into account, and I clicked on "oh dear I have downloaded this by mistake please refund me", and so all's well that ends well.

Probably though, most women should not be allowed to own a Kindle.

I looked with envious eyes at my friends kindle in the pub last week. The screen is wondrous (although ipad for lyfe yo!) and it's so light and very , very nice.

But I agree with the lady in your story. Of the 6 or 7 people who played with it almost everybody touched the screen first then resorted to buttons. That's the default way you expect hand helds to work now days.

Is there any way to get a touch screen on an e-reader without compromising the screen? Because that would be the fushizzle.

I have no idea why you'd want a touchscreen. I don't typically try stroking words when I read books.

The most recent Sony models are touch.

No. The touch screen Sony eReaders have (apparently) noticeably worse screens for it.

Oh, for anyone who thinks (like me) that putting a screensaver on something that has no possible need for a screensaver whilst providing no way to disable it or change the godawful showreel of dead authors is a fucking stupid design decision, there's a handy guide to hacking the device to get rid of it (or use your own pictures) here:

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_ ... .x_Kindles

I thought the Sony e-reader screens looked fab, and the touch screen works really well. I drew a picture of a dinosaur on one of the working display units in Waterstones a few weeks ago, and it was very responsive.

Still, the Kindle seems like a nicer machine to use for the main purpose (that of reading) from what I understand as there s a flash and delay when you 'turn the page' on the Sony ones, which I gather isn't the case with Kindles. Also, I think someone said you need specific software to use the Sony ones? Booo to that.

There's always a flash and delay, on all e-ink devices, because it's redrawing the screen. Still, it's quicker than it would normally take to turn a physical page, I don't see the issue.

It was me who said about the Sonys. Mine was a nightmare for just refusing to ever talk to my PC.

The Sony software was just awful

Calibre is much better, but still pretty bad in terms of usability.

I found it was the USB driver that was the issue. Half the time the reader wouldn't talk to Calibre either.

I would intuitively expect to be able to make a "swipe" gesture from right to left to be able to turn the "page".

Hrmm, true - but is it experience of apple products that makes you expect that? I don't see that on its own as being worth putting in a touchscreen for. Especially as it's easier to turn the pages without doing that, as you don't need to move your hand.

If my Kindle had a touchscreen, it'd only get used when n00bs picked it up. I'd continue to use the hard buttons.

It wasn't the speed of the page urn on the sony e-reader that bothered me, it was the 'flash' of the screen which bothered my eyes a little.

Oh, OK. Well, the Kindle does it too.

Choosing which book to read and navigating more than a few pages in either direction seemed massively clumsy on my mates kindle. A touchscreen would stop that. It isn't a big deal mind.-

What?! The 'next page' button is under your thumb. Tapping into your optic nerve and knowing when you've reached the end of the page wouldn't be a more seamless way of turning pages!

Oh yes, but I found that to be a Windows Vista problem, it was forever fucking up USB drivers and I had no end of issues with my Sony Reader connecting up, somedays it would work, other days it wouldn't.

Worked fine on my XP machine, and once I binned Vista and went to Windows 7 on my main machine, it worked fine again.

Um... Wha?
"Long-distance" nav can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of it (and even then it's still a little clunky), but how would a touch screen make it better?

I'm thinking about getting a Kindle for my gf at Christmas. iPad ownership has spoilt me somewhat in that I'm starting to expect my devices to serve more than just one purpose, but I'm presuming the Kindle is literally just an eBook reader and nowt else?

Also, I'm afraid I don't fancy reading the previous 9 pages of this thread to see if these next two questions have already been answered but:

1) If we've got WiFi in the house, is there any reason to get the 3G Kindle? Does the 3G connectivity solely allow you to access the Kindle store whilst out and about?

2) Can you upload eBooks not purchased from the Kindle store to it?

Thanks and ta and all that! Bye!

Kindle can get on the web to view websites and play MP3s and show black and white photos.
You don't want to rely on it to do these things, though.

1) Yes (get one) No (it can get on the web, I posted this when I didn't have my phone. It's crap at it, though).
2) Yes.

And it can do this with it's FREE4EVA 3G SIM card? That sounds pretty good!

Well, yes. But it's not a very good web experience.
It's far more useful for buying books when out and about.

Ok for checking emails and stuff like weather forecasts in a pinch though?

If only we had some sort of search facility on the Internet.

Yes.

I noticed there's a version of Scrabble you can buy for it too.

Ah! But then that would be too easy. And what is life without challenge?

Plus, my questions have prompted discussion between two fellow human beings and thus helped preserve the traditions of inter-personal communication in this increasingly inhuman, digital age.

And I couldn't be bothered doing a search.

Thanks though Grim... my questions have been answered and I'll order one on pay day. I think she'll like it.

Edited: to correct brainwrongs.

Do people do that?