Camille was so excited to see a package locker key in our mail yesterday … I had looked at the tracking and knew that it had arrived at the post office, so I wasn’t too surprised.
When we took it out, it struck me that it was actually smaller than I had expected. The carrying case seems a little awkward, like the Kindle could fall out easily.
We plugged it in and turned it on, as instructed. The interface took about five minutes to get used to, very easy. The only problem we had was trying to get it to connect to the Sprint wireless network that it uses. At times, we could connect to the Amazon store easily and at other times it would give up. We did buy two books over the wireless, and that went very smoothly.
I tried to use the experimental web connection. Out of the three times I tried, I was able to use Google and read a news article over the wireless connection. I don’t know if our wireless problems are because of where we live or something else. Also, the wireless only works in the US, so no downloading books while out of the country. Thankfully, the USB connection seems to work well enough to load books onto the Kindle.
Books from Amazon seem to be about half of the cover price. Not really cheap, but reasonable. One of the nice things is that we are able to download a sample of the book for free and start reading before choosing to buy. I do wish that the sample would be automatically removed upon purchase though.
Rob searched and found lots of free books. One site is FeedBooks. He couldn’t use the web connection, so he downloaded quite a number of books and used the USB to get them on the Kindle.
A nice site is Amazon Kindle Guide.
Camille can’t wait to leave for our trip, so she can start reading Kindle books.
I wonder if we would have trouble with the wireless part as well…I can’t even use my cell phone at my house. I think it’s Stone Mountain blocking some waves…but who knows. And the only internet service we can get in our neighborhood is Bell South…and they are unreliable at best. Ack!
I’ll experiment with the wireless at some point. But we haven’t gone past our city limits for a few days … I doubt we’ll go anywhere today, but I’ll take “Hermione” with us when we go out tomorrow and see if we can get a signal from Clarkston or Decatur.
I’m fascinated by your Kindle reports 🙂 I’m kicking around the idea of putting one on my Christmas list.
Out of curiosity, how fast is the USB transfer for a whole book? Since it’s text, it shouldn’t be as bad as audio, I’d think, but I was just wondering about the speed.
Transfer is super fast. 30 secs for a book. The files are very small.