I picked up a Kindle a couple months ago to review for the December 2008 edition of the Linux Journal. At the time I wrote the review, I had had the Kindle for less than a week, so I thought I would let everyone know what the past couple of months have been like, now that the Kindle is thoroughly broken in.
First, I still use the Kindle every day. This is significant because I have several gadgets that I’ve used for a couple weeks and then not used very much afterwards.
Next, the I still think the screen on the Kindle is awesome. It works very well for long reading sessions.
And what do I read on the Kindle? Well, there’s a bunch of books from the Baen Free Library, a bunch of Cory Doctorow books, and several books from ManyBooks.net which in turn came from Project Gutenburg. The one thing all of these sources have in common is that the books are free (mostly as in beer, but also the other kind of freedom for some of them). Yes I’m a cheapskate. However, I haven’t read them all, and until I do I don’t see any reason to go buying more. I also have several documents I’ve converted using the @free.kindle.com conversion service.
The features of the Kindle that I don’t use are: the mp3 player, the picture viewer, and pretty much anything else that is not directly related to reading books. The Kindle is a book reader and it doesn’t work very well beyond that. It’s an excellent book reader though, so I can forgive its imperfections in other areas.
It’s an excellent product. If you are the type of person who does not read for fun, the Kindle is not going to turn you into someone who does. But if you are, get one.