Why get the Amazon Kindle

I had to treat myself for Christmas and I got myself the Amazon Kindle. A wireless eBook reader made perfect sense to me since I was about to buy 3-5 new books. Amazon Kindle was the device of choice after couple of days of research. Here is why:

• The first question was: Kindle or Nook?

The answer became clear after reviewing the Nook at the BN store in the city. The first software version of the Nook is very buggy: scrolling issues, freezing, taking too long, and other problems. That is according the person who was selling it at the store. All this was suppose to be fixed by the new firmware upgrade coming February 1st 2010. Well, too bad. I cannot wait that long. I like all the new Nook features such as 14 days book sharing, easy upgradable SD card, and more, but I need something robust that will make me ready the books asap! So getting on Christmas Eve’s day via next-day shipping from Amazon was perfect.

• Second Question is, why get the Kindle at all?

1. I usually buy around 10 to 20 books per year each averaging around $20 per. That is $400 worth of physical or audio books per year. Since most book titles on the Kindle are $9.99, it’s a no brainier. I will recover/save the $260  price of the kindle in 1.3 year.  So on the long run it makes sense.

2. I mostly download and listen to the books via my iPhone after buying them on Audible.com. The Amazon Kindle experimental text to speech feature takes care of this for me now. Although  experimental and not near the quality of the audio books, I’m pretty impressed by it. It’s very good for people who like to listen and read at the same time as it flips the pages automatically.. see video below

You can select male or female voice and choose between slow, regular, or fast speeds. It works well for my long drives.

Those were the 2 main reasons why it got it among others.

Finally, few notes after playing with it for couple of days so far:

• Subscribing to Blogs & Magazines at a monthly rate of $2/blog & $10/newspaper does not make sense! Maybe nice for the blog owners and traditional media to create a new revenue stream which they are badly looking for, but I can already read those bolgs & newspapers [TechCrunch/NY Times/etc] on my iPhone for free & in full color and with faster scrolling. Also the experimental Kindle browser lets you view those blogs and newspapers anyways although very limited. The fee is really for optimization then.
• The font and screen E-Ink technology works well – legible and easy on the eyes.
• Definitely buy the official leather protection cover, it fits great, and provides good protection.
• Not all books come with the text-to-speech feature as it is the right of the author to make that available or not, which is a bummer because the book I really wanted [4 hour work week expanded version] had that feature disabled – Mr. Tim Ferriss knows that he will be selling the audio version, and didn’t want to compromise the audio sales it seems. So moral of the story is to check the features available with the book before you buy if you must have that.

Tags: Kinlde, Mobile Devices, wireless

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.