Reading Experience
I’ve read a fictional novel in the past week and have started to read a non-fictional book. It was great for the Kindle system to keep my place in the books and be able to easily switch between my Kindle and my android phone and pickup where I left off on the other device. I did not use my PC’s to do any reading last week. It is neat to see your progression through a book represented as percentage complete.
I found if light got low and a reading light was not readily available, switching to the droid allowed for low light reading. I didn’t do this often, most of the time I had enough light to read by, as one would with a physical book. The automatic bookmark synchronization between devices was very convenient. I never lost my place once :-)
Why I chose the Kindle in the first place
Amazon Kindle
Several of my blog readers asked me to compare the Kindle to the Nook. I don’t have a Nook but will share with you my reasoning for picking the Kindle over the other e-book readers on the market. I was looking for an e-ink device so will not compare to the iPad in this analysis.
In my opinion the front runners in the e-book reading marketplace are the Kindle and the Nook. The Kobo and Sony are e-ink readers but I quickly eliminated them from my choices available based on the market share they have and reviews about them I had read online. The Kobo got poor reviews and the Sony I saw in Office Depot and did not like how it handled or looked.
The Nook and Kindle are both backed by large libraries of e-books, and both offer free classics.
B&N Nook
The Nook has some unique and interesting features that make it very attractive.
- Free assistance from employees at Barnes & Noble stores
- Read any e-book for free for one hour while at a Barnes & Noble store.
- Color touchscreen book covers and menus, (book text is black & white).
- Ability to ‘lend or borrow’ books between Nook friends, restricted to 14 day loan period.
- Reasonable quantity of Text Books in e-book format.
- Extend-able memory through Micro-SD Memory slot.
- EPub ‘open’ e-book format supported.
- Runs on open source Android operating system, a true computer OS.
The Kindle 3 also has some unique features.
- WhisperSync – keeps your place between reading devices (Nook website says ‘coming soon’).
- Integration and account synchronization with Audible.com audio book library.
- WebKit based browser which results in great web page rendering.
- Extraordinary battery life – one month without wireless.
- Lightest e-book reader in its class.
- Free 3g web browsing.
The Nook features are very strong and technically it probably is the better reader, so why did I choose the Kindle over the Nook?
The two clinchers for me were
- The Financial solidity of Amazon. With e-books they are stored by the host company in a library. You can download from the library to your device. If you lose your device or it breaks, the books you purchased are still with the host company and available for download again. Barnes & Noble are unprofitable and in August 2010 put themselves up for sale. What will the future of the B&N e-book library be? No one can know and the uncertainty of this makes me skittish about putting dollars into a library of books I may lose control / access to in the not to distant future.
- Integration with Audible.com. I have been an Audible subscriber for 6 months or more and have quite a collection of audio books. These are instantly available on the Kindle because Amazon own Audible.com. I have listened to some of my audio books on the Kindle and they play as well as any MP3 player I have. For now one still has to buy audio and e-books separately and could end up paying twice. I am hopeful, as Amazon continue to integrate Audible into the Kindle ecosystem that a single payment will give access to both formats.
Had Barnes & Noble been more financially stable, my choice would have been much closer.
Books Read last week
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larrson. Murder Mystery fictional book. Highly recommended
Lies, Damn Lies and Science – Sherry Seethaler – Non fictional – Not enough read to recommend.
Oh yeah and I read the Kindle Users Guide :-)
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