Be Excellent To Each Other

A man with warm hands, apparently .

Also - Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan.

I noted a bit of input lag on the Kindle when I was playing with the one JenAli bought me on christmas day. Combined with drink, I soon realised turning one click off was a good idea. At least you can cancel accidental purchases.

Pretty sure none of the Morgan books are on Kindle.

so, i want a kindle. Should i fork out the extra for the 3g model?

Well, pink and rubbery, actually.

I will have to have words with her next time I see her!

Yes.

okay, thanks.

/places bet

Personally, I would say no. Just not necessary in my view, unless you had a job where you were constantly travelling and that, and always wanted to be downloading books every day or something, and couldn't guarantee being near a wireless connection.

I would say yes, mainly because of the number of times I've finished a book on the train and then gone and bought a new one.
As Starling points out though, this isn't much use if you don't spend a lot of time on the train.
If you have a groovy phone that can act as a wifi point then you needn't bother, obviously.

so what can you actually do on the 3g? Is it just buy books?

It has a web browser of sorts. Enough to use google mail and the like.

I like having it available, simply for emergency use and the like, although you wouldn't want to use it as a matter of course.

Huh. I looked for those a couple of weeks back and couldn't find them - then I found my paperback of Altered Carbon and read that instead.

The way I see it is that in a year's time if you go on holiday or somewhere and have your Kindle there might come a time you'd regret not having the 3G. On the other hand you aren't going to miss the extra money by then.

this crossed my mind, but I can't think of a time abroad that I've not been able to get wifi on my iPhone either, so would be able to download, if slighly more problematic.

The 3G SIMs don't have roaming, do they?

Yes, it does. It works in 81 countries world-wide without any extra configuration or cost. Neat, huh?

Yes, I went for the 3G, it's only 30 quid or so dearer, and the neatness factor of it "just working" anywhere is well worth that, I think.

I'd imagine thar the flicker from that e-ink screen whenever it updates must make for a less than ideal web browsing experience, right?

To be honest that's not a big deal, main drawbacks are the small size, mono reproduction, and fiddly cursor operation. Still good if you need it though!

You bastards. I've been saving for a new PC and have been avoiding looking at the kindle online or in rl (my parents have them). I read a lot of classics and made the mistake of going ooh free books and want want want want want so very very badly and as I don't own a mobile phone*/ipad/anything that isn't plugged into the wall for the Internet in this house I would get genuine use out of that side of things.

Blew my savings on the version with 3g - as said it's only £30 extra and in my case it's worth it for back up and for the google maps gps thing. What wasn't needed but I got it anyway was a nice red leather case (no light) which I suspect is the difference between it feeling like a gadget and a book for me.



*I really don't, and have never, owned a mobile phone.

I tried this side of it once, and thought it was all a bit pointless really, and you know, if I want to look at the internet I'll use my laptop.

You can understand why they included it I suppose, since every gadget you can now buy has a web browser and all that gubbins, so they probably felt the Kindle needed one too. Personally, I'd have preferred this wasn't there and it was £20 cheaper or something.

Still, whatever. It's a terrific device, and it's for reading books on, at the end of the day.

Actually changed order to the non 3G one as not only had my order not been processed, it also wouldn't turn up till the 6th of Jan - and that's with the fast delivery option. Shame but I'm impatient and don't trust the weather or amazon when it comes to delivery dates being pushed back and back.

Well, it's basically free to add - there's no required extra hardware to support it and they'd already written/ported[1] a HTML rendering engine for the on-device book store.

[1] Kindle 1 and 2 are a custom engine, Kindle 3 is WebKit

Oh fair play then, and I didn't know that.

I know they said they've included it on this new Kindle as an experimental feature - see how people take to it I suppose, and how popular it is.

What happened was that the Kindle 1 had a HTML engine for the store and Wikipedia, and some clever people found a way to make it access any webpage. Amazon responded by making that feature official but marking it as "experimental" (and hence unsupported), which is how it remains to this day.

It only worked in the USA to start with, as well. It only started working in the UK about May this year.

It's here. Yay. (nice cover ordered the day before not here. Boo)

It's slightly heavier than I was expecting but then there was a lot of it's lighter than a ghost's fart hype going on. It's easy to use one handed (note: I have man hands) the screen is just as good as people said it is, it's easy to set up and the battery charges astonishingly fast. It really is an amazing gadget. Only had a bit of a go on the browser and at first glance it seems to be a fiddly slow pain in the arse. Other slight niggle is that I can see what all the grumbling over the back button is, on the plus side there are not annoying MS "are you sure you want to breath in and out?" messages but the position if the damn thing is wrong and it's given to much prominence on the keypad. Right now it feels like a gadget, when the cover turns up I'm sure it will feel more like a book.


edit: magical powers of postman summoning, hit reply and cover came through the door.

The painted Man is pretty bloody good, isn't it?

The sequel is equally as good, can't wait for the third

Yep I had finished the Painted Man by the day after I bought it and immediatly bought the sequel. I'm about a third of the way into that and enjoying it hugely. I just spent about an hour browsing Amazon for similar fantasy epics but couldn't find anything I wanted.

Richard Morgan.

Although his fantasy book "[something] Steel" is a bit, um...

Just buy Altered Carbon.

I'm reading 'Altered Carbon' at the moment. Seems decent.

Just ordered a Kindle. It is really annoing having to buy each book one at a time, why can't I make ashopping basket?

If you have your kindle connected with one click on it's downloaded to your machine in seconds so I suspect that's something to do with it.

Newsflash! Yanks can now lend each other books for 14 days via amazon even if you don't own a kindle.

Erm, what's this '51 highlighters' business with the underlined text?

Almost immediately turned off, in my case.

It's telling you how many other people on the Kindle service highlighted that section of the book. You can disable it under, umm, settings, somewhere.

It's pretty hateful for general books, although I'd imagine it could be handy for textbooks.

Incidentally, Kindle book loaning is now live in the US and hopefully soon in the UK. You send the book to another Amazon account and, for two weeks, they can read it but you can't.

Publishers can choose to disable lending for their books, though, and I don't know how good the coverage is. Let's hope they aren't shitheads about it.

That's excellent. Now if they could just sort out the ability to give books as gifts.

And 'UR FUNCTIONS'?



Ok, yeah it's a bit pointless unless you're writing an English essay isn't it.

That went live about a month ago in the US, I'm not sure about here.

I've read that.

The Doc clearly has Decca on ignore

I fell for the hype and almost seriously expected it to be so light it would more or less float on its own air current or something. As as result, finding it actually heavy in use, I was mildly disappointed.

In reality, I suppose it's exactly the same as holding an actual book, so it's absolutely fine, obviously, but there is no way I would describe the Kindle as "light".

I would never try to put someone off buying one - they're fantastic, and they do exactly what they need to do, and very well.

I got one for my GF at Christmas and it feels pretty light to me - no more than a small paperback and a hell of a lot less than the Hardback monster I'm reading now.

I just finished the second one, it's brilliant! I hate that we need to wait for ages for more. I am currently of the mind that it is one of the best fantasy stories I have ever read. If Hollywood got hold of it they would never be able to make a film that would do it justice but in a way I hope they try anyway, just so as the author gets the recognition and makes the fortune that he deserves.
I want more now

Jeez, how feeble are you? Are your arms made of butterscotch brandysnap? The kindle is demonstrably not heavy at all and I imagine your arms would snap if you owned an iPad, which weighs the same as a bag of sugar.

I agree. The thing is very, very light for what it is. Anyone struggling to hold it is clearly made of feathers.

The screen is awesome too. I tried to peel off the 'instructions panel' on it before realising it was actually the screen.

My only minor gripe is that the buttons for moving the page are the same on both sides, and several times I have pressed the one on the left to try to go back a page, and it moves it on a page instead, but I guess they have to do that so as not to be racist to left handers.

personally i don't get the macbook air in the same way.. it's not like my macbookpro feels heavy in any way..

Re the couple of comments above (typing this on an iPod Touch and can't get it to quote properly), I've never said I "struggle" to use the Kindle, I merely found it heavier than the hype suggested.

I've also clearly said it's the same as holding a real book, so is obviously fine, and that the Kindle is all round fab.