My Amazon Kindle arrived last Monday — it has been a good week. I finished reading my first book, so here are some impressions of my experience so far.

The Good

• The text is crisp, clean, and readable.
• The battery life and wireless signal have both been excellent. I’ve charged it a few times, but haven’t even gotten the battery below halfway yet.
• For all the critique about how ugly it is, I don’t think it’s so bad in person.
• I just read a book that didn’t require a tree to be produced. It also isn’t going to require space on a bookshelf.
• I love the fact that I can read with one hand. Sometimes I try to read while feeding my son a bottle. With a book…not so easy. With the Kindle…a piece of cake.
• One of my personal concerns was that it is so easy to purchase books that I would get myself in trouble by making a lot of impulsive purchases. It’s actually worked the other way around. I’ve only purchased the one book that I’ve read so far. Usually I buy books because I want to have them available for when I am ready to read them. With the Kindle, I don’t have to buy them until the moment I’m ready to begin.
• The fact that you can download samples means that I have been able to explore a few other books I had on my wish list. This is actually helping me make better decisions about books to read. I have had The 4-Hour Work Week on my wish list for a while. After reading the intro and sample, I decided it wasn’t a book that was going to be worth my time.
• I’ve been able to load a few .doc and .pdf files on there as reference material. It is a piece of cake to search through those documents for what I’m looking for.

The Improvable

• I wish the screen had a little more contrast to it, or could be adjusted. With good lighting, it is very readable, but in medium to lower light settings, I think it is actually a tad bit more difficult to read than a book.
• The library of what is available is still quite limited. I’m hoping that the initial popularity of the Kindle will help change that more quickly.
• The case that came with the Kindle looks really nice. When it is closed, the Kindle is secure, but when the case is open, I wouldn’t want to rely on it to keep the Kindle securely in place.
• I like that I can easily copy highlights and notes from my Kindle to my book notes database on my Mac. But, it is cumbersome. All the notes and highlights for all books live in one file which is quickly going to grow pretty large unless I regularly clean them out, but then I think I lose the highlights and notes made on the Kindle itself.
• I’d like to see more ways to sort through the contents of the Kindle. I usually have it set to sort the books based on how recently they have been accessed. That is pretty useful, but more options would be helpful. I had a spare 1gb SD card which I put in. I’d like to use it as an archive of sorts for books that I want to search, but not have to see all the time. Unfortunately, there is no way to have the Kindle home screen hide the titles that are on the SD card.

The Jury Is Still Out

• My next purchase will probably be a TNIV Bible. The idea of having a Bible on here is appealing, but obviously the structure of the Bible makes it unique to navigate through. From the sample, it seems like they’ve made it pretty easy to work through with lots of links to chapters, etc. but I won’t know until I’ve had multiple chances to use it.
• There has been a lot of critique of the buttons on the side. I find that the buttons on the left side work well for me as I often just hold it in the left hand. Because the one on the right hand side is angled down, it does seem a bit awkward. Because of the way I’ve been holding it, it has worked fine so far, but I might find that I’m limited to only holding it this way which could cause some fatigue.

I have a Kindle on order from Amazon. Right now, they are so backordered that they aren’t even able to give me a potential shipping date. I know that is true because I check the order status about 6-10 times a day!

This is the second Kindle I’ve ordered. I ordered one on Thanksgiving, because at the time they were saying they weren’t going to be shipping until December 3. I figured I could at least reserve a place in the queue and that would give me two weeks to figure out if there was a way to afford one. I was still in the midst of figuring about four days after I had ordered it, and leaning toward canceling the order, when I got a surprise notification from Amazon that it had shipped.

About that same time, Amazon had changed their estimated shipping date for new orders to “sometime after Christmas”. As soon as mine arrived, I listed it on ebay, and it ended up selling for enough to pay for that one as well as the second one I have now ordered! So…I figured out a way to pay for a Kindle!

In spite of having mine paid for, I’m a little stunned and saddened by the insanity that surrounds the release of a hot item like this. Kindles are regularly selling on ebay for two and a half times retail on ebay, apparently just because either people really want to give them to someone for Christmas, or they can’t wait until January to have one at the normal price. One seller even sold a handful of them for twice the retail price even though the listing clearly stated that it was a presale for “when Amazon releases it again”. I contacted the seller who openly confirmed that he/she had just ordered the kindle a few days prior. In other words, in the buying frenzy, several buyers paid twice the amount when they could have just ordered one direct from Amazon for retail price and had about the same wait time.

There is lots that could be said, but I’ll keep it simple: Chaos tends to creep up on all sides during this time of year. May this be a season wherepeace and good will toward others abound.

As a bibliophile and technophile, I’m pretty intrugued with the idea of Amazon’s new Kindle e-reader. I’ve never been that interested in e-readers before but this one seems to capture some features that would make it more appealing — wireless shopping and downloading from anywhere, and reduced pricing on books where you are paying only for content and not packaging.

I doubt I’m going to be able to find $400 to carve out of the family budget anytime soon for one of these, but it’s a product I’ll be keeping my eye on as it moves into it’s second or third generation.