Chrs' emporium of Techie stuff and other assorted things

Crosspost from my blog.

Permalink: http://blog.chrs181818.com/?p=23

I recently (after a few weeks of um-ing and arr-ing about it) picked up a Kindle. I don’t have an appropriate picture-taking device, so have an amazon link instead. I ended up deciding on the £109 Kindle Touch despite some original doubts about the ease of use of the interface and that the touch is the better device – despite being £20 more expensive.

…On the down side, I had to buy it in PC World/Currys - I still don’t feel clean – although it did allow me to pick up a “cheap” case (only £10 rather than £20).

I only have a few books so far (I picked up a Kindle version of Flatland, a book on Game Theory and A Song of Ice and Fire – Game of Thrones) but my experience so far is positive. Reading using the Kindle is considerably more comfortable and a lot easier – pressing a part of the screen rather than turning a page (although, sometimes you can miss the bit you need to press or press for too long and end up going forward five pages, which is irritating.) The number of free books and books with a very low price is also very nice – allows you to try out things you’re not quite sure about.

The books are – on the whole – cheaper on the Kindle than in dead-tree form. There are some exceptions to the rule – publishers apparently didn’t get the memo about the lower distribution and production costs for e-books and somehow think it’s reasonable to charge more. I would advise that you kept an eye out for that sort of thing. The other problem I’m running in to is splitting up a series across formats – I can’t have part of a series in book form and the rest on the Kindle! It’s an abomination! I need to decide how to resolve this for a few books I want to buy.

I also have another gripe – the one-click-checkout provided by amazon is useful but you can’t add kindle books to your cart and purchase them the regular way – this means lots of little transactions hitting your card instead of one big one. I found a work-around in that you can buy yourself a gift certificate, but this is something that really should be supported by default because there’s really no reason for it not to be.



All-in-all, I’m happy about my pre-exam purchase and am trying to convince myself that it’ll somehow help me revise.

It won’t.

Now to spend all of my money on books.