Wooo.. Kindle

Being a big reader and a tech gear junkie, I was rather tempted when Amazon announced the Kindle back in 2007. Somehow I managed to hold out on buying it until they announced the 2.0 version in early February. I pre-ordering it right away, and got my hands on it just last week.

So far, I like it. Its thinner than I expected. Definitely very easy to use. I can hold it in one hand and access most of the controls that I need to read a book. The left side has the "Previous Page" and "Next Page" buttons while on the right side the "Previous Page" button is replaced by a "Home" button. Since I tend to read books in one direction, this seems to work fine.

The free built in wireless is great for getting books, and occasionally pulling up text-only web sites. Due to the rather slow refresh on screen changes using it as a regular web browser is a bit tough.

My biggest complaint is the DRM for files through the Kindle store. After being bitten by DRM from the iTunes Music store, I definitely have a bad taste in my mouth over DRM. Luckily there are other options out there.

The first for me is Many Books. They offer a lot of free content in quite a few eBook formats, including both the native Kindle format and Mobibook which the Kindle also supports. They even have a Mobile Interface which works well from the Kindle itself. Most of the content has elapsed copyrights (older books), but there are occasionally newer books either available with sample chapters or content that was published under a Creative Commons License.

Next was O'Reilly. Being a big tech book reader, I have a lot of O'Reilly books.

O'Reilly offers a number of their books in DRM-free E-Book formats, including the Kindle supported Mobibook format. They're not free, but I don't have any objection to paying for content, just having its usage limited by DRM. They even provide free updates to the books as new revisions are published. I just wish they made it a bit easier to get a list of just their books available in E-Book format.

While I definitely like the Kindle, the only thing I'm not sure about at this point is if it was worth the cost or not. The Kindle costs $360. Sony's offering is quite a bit cheaper, although I have no idea how it compares feature wise.