Kindle 2

[carrie]

I love mine, which was a lovely Christmas gift but came only yesterday because the Kindle 1s were sold out and I was automatically upgraded to Kindle 2.

So, if you can, please help me decide how to catch up on my bestseller out-of-the-loop-ness. Which books in the last 5 years or so did you really love? (I suppose they don't need to be in the bestseller category but they're probably more likely to have a Kindle edition if they are.) My first book is White's Lincoln biography, and I just ordered Sanger's The Inheritance. Recommendations for both fiction and nonfiction would be much appreciated! Thanks!

[Innocent Bystander]

The Time Traveller's Wife.

.....mmmm, yeah. That's all.

Oh... non-fiction! The Punishment of Virtue.

[emmline]

I have a 1. So, I'm a wee bit jealous because I suspect that you've escaped the excessive button-pushability flaw.
Still, the thing has its usefulness, and the book I just finished is A Brief History of Progress by Ronald Wright.
It's a very short book, based on lectures, but if you'd like to be enthralled and yet horrified at how our civilization is
teetering on the brink of repeating the self-destructive collapses of Easter Island, Sumeria, the Mayans, and Rome,
it's a good thing to read.

p.s. I also have the unabridged English-language version of Les Miserables, which was only about $1.50. It's not
for everyone though, I realize.

p.p.s. The Kindle thing has kind of given me a way to re-join the book group I more or less dropped out of for a year
or so, because I can obtain the books quickly and easily without having the thing left around the house when I'm done, and
it is very easy to read a kindle while elliptical trainering. Hence, I am more apt to do the additional reading.

[missy]

I got a Sony ebook for Christmas. Tom looked at both the Kindle and the ebook, and thought that the ebook would better fit my reading lists and styles.

I've only downloaded one "current best seller" so far - the lastest Clive Cussler. I've got my ebook filled with lots of free books. I got 100 free "classics" from Sony with the purchase. Sony also had 10 free Random House books in January. They have a lot of other books for $1 or less, and with the ebook supporting .pdf, .doc, and several other formats, I've been finding lots of free books on the web to download.

[BillChin]

I'm currently reading "The Snowball," a biography of Warren Buffett. It is a long book, around 900 pages. For a fast reader, it is a good one for the Kindle, because the physical book is so big and heavy.

The Kindle looks so cool, but I never buy books (gifts and library), so it is not a good option for me. The device would help with the clutter problem many avid book readers eventually get, with 1500 books fitting on the current device. That will go up even more with the next generation that comes out in another year or two. Yikes, 1500 books might be more than I have read in my entire life, including school books.

[Dale]

Join goodreads.com and you can look at Dale's Books!

I love this little book: Jim the Boy by Tony Earley



Dale

[Lambchop]

I was thinking of getting a Kindle 2.

[carrie]

Thanks for the suggestions! I've ordered some of them; some of them aren't available for Kindle (yet).

I'm digging it. I'm starting to feel some vaguely visceral pleasure when I anticipate picking up the Kindle to read, like I used to get from books whose pages looked or felt "just so." I have always loved the look of words into type and the Kindle is really doing it for me.

Thanks again for the recommendations.

[I.D.10-t]

I would throw in some fun stuff like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Les Misérables. Here is Gutenberg's Top 100 EBooks last 30 days. I never know when I'll be in the mood for a book. Moby Dick was on my shelf for about 3 years when I took it down and read it cover to cover in about a week.

[Doug_Tipple]

I'm looking for a birthday gift for my wife. She thinks that she would like the Kindle 2 or the Sony reader, but she would like more comparison of the two in order to make a decision. I find it a little strange, but the Kindle 2 is for sale in Indianapolis only by mail order. You can't go anywhere in town and pick one up in your hands to look it over. One store does carry the Sony. In lieu of being able to physically compare readers, does anyone here have opinions about which one of the above is the better buy. My wife is concerned that she will have difficulty reading the small print on the reader screen. She generally reads historical novels. Is there a place online that compares these two readers?

[Dale]

I'm looking for a birthday gift for my wife. She thinks that she would like the Kindle 2 or the Sony reader, but she would like more comparison of the two in order to make a decision. I find it a little strange, but the Kindle 2 is for sale in Indianapolis only by mail order. You can't go anywhere in town and pick one up in your hands to look it over. One store does carry the Sony. In lieu of being able to physically compare readers, does anyone here have opinions about which one of the above is the better buy. My wife is concerned that she will have difficulty reading the small print on the reader screen. She generally reads historical novels. Is there a place online that compares these two readers?

I have a Kindle 2 next to me here which I've been evaluating for my employer. I think that I would buy one for my personal use if they were $200 or under. I continue to believe they are overpriced. But, the screen is great (and you can crank up the font size to a huge size), the wireless connection is very useful, and the battery life very, very long. Doesn't take long to get a feel for the controls. Most books are $10.

[emmline]

I agree with Dale that it is overpriced. Silly priced, really. But I think the easy and quick downloadability of books, via one's Amazon account, is a great advantage. There have been a few occasions when some book or other has intrigued me, but I'm reluctant to acquire another dust-collecting, space-occupying object. So, for $9.99 in most cases, I said "ok Kindle...go fetch."

OTOH, not everything I have loved is available on Kindle, so--looking at it retrospectively--there are things that wouldn't be Kindle-able that I'd want. However, I think that situation improves daily.

I do not know what the Sony book acquisition method is, so I cannot compare.

[Doc Jones]

I got a kindle 2 for my wife for her birthday a week ago. She's quite enamored of it.

My understanding is that you can email any PDF file to the kindle folks and they'll re-format it into Kindle-eze and send it back to you for free. Haven't tried that yet.

If true, it opens up a vast cache of books. Not the least of which would be the 28,000 free books from the Gutenberg project.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Doc