“Bha mi a’ feuchainn aisling-latha ach m’inntinn air falbh! ~~~ I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.” — Steven Wright

Pam & I had been debating whether we should get a digital text reader for several  months. We  weren’t in a rush to get the Kindle as it wasn’t available in Canada at that time. So I took the subject to my favourite webpage “GOOGLE” &  checked out what was being said about them. Luckily there were only 3 at that time so the surfing wasn’t so bad.  The Kindle 2 & the Sony Reader & more recently the ‘Kobo’ from Indigo/Chapters.  After a lot surfing; blog reading & just plain wandering we came to the conclusion that the Kindle 2 had exactly what we wanted in an electronic reader.  The Kindle DX 10.4″ size was too big for me as was the  price so picking the Kindle 2 was a no brainer. { I just noticed that the Kindle 2 is now down to $189 compared to the heaftier  $259.00 that we paid last month! }

My/our ‘Kindle 2′ arrived 2 days before our trip down to Ottawa giving me lots of time & conditions under which I could check out all of it’s features; uses & weaknesses.  (A journey of approx.  3527kms (2020 miles)) . The Wifi / 3G service up here in LA (La Ronge, SK) wasn’t strong enough to even register the device itself with Amazon.  Although I was still able to access my ‘Kindle’ e-mail  & webspace & I could still buy & download books to the device via the computer.

Ideally for the device to access Amazon Books or the Internet it needs to connect with either Amazon’s own WhisperNet WiFi service. And was available in most of the larger cities from here here to Ottawa but the more commonly available 3G phone service worked as as well the in smaller urban centers. The EDGE connection (the 3rd WiFI type) worked very poorly … mostly not  at all! {EDGE is not much faster than a 56k dial up connection but  3G offers broadband speeds. } BTW; All of these connections are Free to access.

There was a strong 3G in PA (Prince Albert, SK)  where we spent our first night on the road. After registering the device I immediately went to Amazon’s Kindle Books page & bought 2 excellent books for us to read on our journey. { Wicked Cool by Diane Farr & Nowhere to Run by C. J. Box } After I jumped on it’s basic Web Browser connection which works best on the text-centric Web pages. Web sites like Google and Wikipedia; the Weather site &  a number of  Mobile friendly sites. I even managed to access my Gmail account  & checked my e-mail. I didn’t try to write any emails but the keyboard is easy enough to use should I had been so inclined.

There’s  quite a few Public Domain sites that also carry FREE digitized books. Seem to be mostly out of copyright books & a lot are the old classics.

For example; ”The Munity on the Bounty”; “Tresaure Island; I even found some of James Joyce’s books” now in the ePub formats. One site called  Archive.org also has some conversion utilities attached to documents that will also convert them to a Kindle compatible format (*.AZW or the .MOBI or .PRC as well as other formats). I downloaded a few of the century old Scottish Gaelic titles & got them them to work. Only problem with that method is the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) isn’t always accurate so you can get a lot mispelled words. The images came out clearly & sharply. It has a high-resolution screen & 16 shades of gray.

I found that some  PDF’s will work while others won’t. Haven’t yet figured out the reason why but will one day!! What I am doing is just trying them out & if they work great but if they don’t … well the heck with them, eh?  :)

There are a now few software conversion packages available that will convert a most of texts types to a Kindle friendly format. Here’s a couple that I’ve tried out. The Mobipocket Reader & the  Auto Kindle eBook Converter I created a 23 page document with OpenOffice then converted it to the a Kindle friendly digitized form with decent results. And except for the font size which came out several sizes smaller than I had intended. And I used a font size that would be normally be considered too big in print form. Although still legible I’d like to have to have the results come out as they’re originally laid-out. Oh well, I guess that’s another area for me to take my wrenches & explore..  :)

I also ran a Microsoft .DOC file through the converter & it worked but the line length & spacing didn’t display in the same manner as document’s original layout. I’ve been messing about with a lot of types of files & so far I have been pleased with the outcome inspite of the little flaws. On a brighter note those flaws will give me an interesting challenge.

To make a long story short, we really like the Kindle. So if you’re looking to get an e-reader for just reading then I would definitely recommend it but if you looking for colour, bells &  whistles beyond reading a book then get an IPad or better yet get yourself an adult sized computer!

-=-=-=

Advertisement