Yeah...try living on another continent.(i am from Lebanon)
I just ordered a Sony reader shipped from the US because i can't take it anymore. Needless to say, shipping will cost me a fortune. It's not unusual to pay more than the actual product price just for shipping.
Any ideas on how to solve the mental map-making problem? I've been reading on my computer for a long time. Sometimes the problem shows up, sometimes it doesn't & I still can't tell why.
"1. It’s bad for research. I’m working on a book right now and I wanted to use the Kindle for all of my research. Sadly, this is almost impossible. The book is a physical object - you can move through it, skimming for notes and important points - and there is something in our education that gives us a sense of space inside a book. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but you know how you can pick up a book and show someone what you’re looking for in a few page turns? You know it was halfway through, maybe a third of the way down the page, and it was near another set of words. The Kindle is not conducive to that kind of mental map-making… yet."
#7 isn't really a reason not to buy a Kindle - like most of the reasons not to, they're just grievances, and #7 isn't even about the kindle, it's about flight attendants.
(though, "You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears." is pretty awesome)
I'm not sure where he was going with that one. It has a battery. It has a microprocessor. It is an electronic device and should be turned off along with Nintendo DS the 10 year old in the seat next to him is holding.
I got one yesterday and can say I'm already reading better (i.e., more thoroughly, more attentively) than I would at desktop or laptop. No zillions of tabs, virtual desktops, tiled windows -- just you and your book or news article. And no temptation really to tab around because refresh/redraw and the nav is just pokey enough to provide an incentive to stay on the page. Yes, books and newspapers have been "full-screen" for hundreds of years, but even then you can flip around, be distracted by adjacent stuff. That may be a bug for some. For me and my ADD brain it's a feature.
3. The Kindle is flimsy. You’ll go through your day thinking you will break your Kindle. You don’t fit that much screen on a thin device that is meant to be thrown into a bag without a care and not risk cracking it. There will come a day when you open your bag and see that your Kindle is dead, even in its case. It’s not your fault. Say it with me: it’s not your fault.
True. I'm sure it's partly my fault because I'm not that careful with it, but I've broken the screen on my Kindle (v1) twice in the year and few months I've had it.
correction: I have a doc with monospace (in a personal doc), but the purchased computer books do not have the code samples in monospace for some reason.
they load much faster on the kindle 2. on K1, it used to suck to read graphics-heavy docs (such as the pragmatic programmers beta iphone book), because the page with the images would load more slowly than the text-only pages. that is mostly fixed in this version. the images look better too, thanks to the increased gray-scale support.
the screensaver images look great as always. it makes it seem as if image handling is an under-utilized feature. a black and white graphical novel would look spectacular on this thing.
It's probably just me, but the 10 reasons to buy seemed to far outweigh the reasons against. Someone I know is getting a Kindle2 soon, so I suppose I'll get to judge for myself.
