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Reading the New York Times On a Kindle 2

Posted by kdawson on from the all-the-news-that's-fit-to-squint dept.

reifman links to his thorough and thoughtful review of the experience of reading a newspaper on the Kindle 2. "I've been eager to try The New York Times on the Kindle 2; here's my review with a basic video walk-through and screenshots. I give the Kindle 2 version of The Times a B. Software updates could bring it up to an A-. Kindle designers should have learned more from the iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, my Kindle display scratched less than 24 hours after it arrived. As I detail in the review, Amazon customer service was not very accommodating. Is it my fault — or will Kindle 2 evolve into an Apple 1G Nano-like $22.5M settlement? You can read about Hearst's e-reader for newspapers from earlier today on Slashdot."

5 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. I actually just tried the Kindle II... by solder_fox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A friend of mine bought one for reading in the subway. He finds it great, and he points out correctly that for avid readers it's wonderful just from the standpoint of space conservation. For Manhattan-dwellers especially, that's a major selling point.

    It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)

    Countering that is that it will make some books more accessible. It doesn't take much work to get books now, but the ability to have them in front of you and easily readable right away combined with sample chapters gives you at least part of the convenience of actually walking into a bookstore, only you get it anyplace you can get the data connection.

    I can't speak to the durability, though, because it's still a new toy. Give it a year and see how it holds up in different conditions. But overall, this is definitely a shiny product, in the good sense as opposed to the coefficient-of-specular-reflection-is-too-high sense. It'll probably really help Amazon once the economy picks back up, since more people will have the income to spend on a Kindle and they'll have had a chance to improve it.

    --
    --- Thousands are enslaved every day.
    1. Re:I actually just tried the Kindle II... by JamesTheBoilermaker · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can't load pdfs directly on to the Kindle but instead of sending the file to youraccount@kindle.com for $0.10, you can send it to youraccount@free.kindle.com and it will send you back a link to the converted file which you can download and load on to you Kindle via USB. You can load text files directly on to it. Also, Kindle supports unencrypted Mobi-pocket format, so you can use any available mobi creator to convert pdfs and other documents.

    2. Re:I actually just tried the Kindle II... by sdnick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.

  2. Hey, honey? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Will you hand me the sports section to read while you browse the NYT magazine?

    Hey, where's the crossword?

  3. Re:Free content and pay by the page. by ErikZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Um, they do allow Authors to give their content away. I downloaded a free e-book from Amazon over the weekend.

    The sheer amount of ignorance on this forum has been STAGGERING. What the hell is wrong with you people?

    And if you look up the Kindle Wikipedia page, they list off a dozen stores that sell and give away books that are readable on the Kindle.

    --
    Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.