The Chronic Consumer

This is the second part of my review of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. In the first half of the review, I focused on the problems with Kindle, so in this portion, I’m going to focus on the things I like about Kindle. Let’s get right to it!

First of all, I think the Kindle is a fantastic size. As Amazon notes again and again, Kindle is about the size of an average paperback, which serves to make the reading experience a very good one. The screen is sufficiently large enough that I don’t feel like I’m turning pages too often, yet it’s small enough to keep the device portable. Kindle fits easily into a backpack, carry-on bag, or larger purse, so I bring it with me practically everywhere I go.

A second thing I love about Kindle is the eInk technology that it uses. Prior to Kindle, I read all of my ebooks on a PDA with a tiny screen and too-bright backlight. This led to a lot of eyestrain, which prevented me from reading for longer than, say, 30 minutes at a time. But eyestrain is no longer a problem on Kindle thanks to eInk. The words appear on the screen in much the same way that they appear in a book, making it possible to engage in all-night reading marathons just as I would if I were reading a regular novel.

Third, I absolutely love the Dictionary Lookup feature in Kindle. Whenever I’m reading and come across a word I don’t know, all I have to do is scroll up to the line that the word is in, click the scroll wheel twice, and definitions for all the words in the line appear in a new window. Because it’s so fast and easy to look words up now, I find myself doing so far more often than I would if I didn’t have this built-in dictionary to help. (Definitions come from the New Oxford American Dictionary.)

And finally, I think the Whispernet wireless delivery service works remarkably well and makes getting new content for the Kindle a breeze. I know some people who live in the boonies have complained of not being able to connect to Whispernet with any kind of consistency, but I’ve never had that problem at all. Add in the fact that I can check Wikipedia and Gmail whenever I want, and Whispernet gets even better!

Overall, I absolutely love my Kindle and am glad that I bought it. I had major reservations about doing so at first because I’d read a ton of reviews that trashed the device, but now I’m left wondering if those people really even bought the thing. It seems impossible that they could have been reviewing the same product!

At any rate, I highly recommend Kindle if you’re thinking of getting an ebook reader. It is a thousand times better than trying to read on a PDA or smartphone. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s worth the $359 list price!