The Kindles have come

We did indeed have the pleasure of Andrew and Gina’s company last night, and very good it was too; we managed to be reasonably sensible, stopping after a couple of glasses and getting to bed in reasonable time.

This morning, the weather has been not good again, cold and rainy, though not much wind. It’s being one of those dull Autumns that makes up for such a splendid summer.

The high point of the day was the arrival of the Kindles, a day early; well done Amazon. First impressions are very good, as the beast arrives ready to roll, straight out of the box. Since we’d ordered two, one was already registered to my Amazon account, and the other was readily added once we’d got it connected to the 3 MiFi dongle. In a house, the same could be achieved with a broadband WiFi router, or failing that, you can hook it up to your PC or Mac via USB and do everything that way.

The physical controls are a bit more fiddly than the Sony, except for the page turning buttons located on both sides of the beast. It’s about the same size, but thinner, and around the same weight, so no effort to hold it up for long periods of time whilst reading; it’s a lot lighter than a blockbuster paperback. You don’t get a leather cover with it, though, which may well have solved our Christmas present problems as well. The page turn on the screen is a bit faster that the Sony, using the same eInk technology.

The most notable thing is the ease with which you can buy books for it, which are, as I said before, generally cheaper than the ones available via the other bookshops. If you are on a WiFi link, you can navigate to the Kindle shop on the reader, search for the book or author you want, choose the title, select “Buy”, and down it comes, being available to read within a minute of selection. Otherwise, you go to the Amazon site, buy it there, and it will download to the Kindle next time it's online.

This compares with, for the Sony Reader:

1. Find the right website on your computer
2. Use one or other of a horrible set of search engines
3. Buy and download a token file
4. Launch Adobe Digital Editions (which you’ve had to download previously)
5. Use ADE to download the main file
6. Transfer that to the Reader via either Sony Digital Library or calibre.

Any book you buy for the Kindle may be read on any Kindle or other machine registered in your name with Amazon (like my Kindle for Mac, or on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch). It will even keep track of how far you’ve got reading it on one device and sync that with the next one you use, so you could be reading the book on your iPhone whilst commuting, for example, carry on at lunch time on your PC at work, then come home and relax with your Kindle, picking up from where you left off each time.

I reckon this means that Amazon will wipe out the opposition, it’s all just so easy.

Apart from playing with the new toys, I've uploaded a set of pictures of the grandkids to Flickr; it's much easier than fiddling about on the static website, especially as the only machine we've got with a viable copy of Dreamweaver is the old iBook.

Otherwise, we’ve had a quiet day – took a stroll out to feed the ducks at lunchtime, and lurked in the boat the rest of the time, doing housework and reading. The shutters are all finished, so we’re just waiting for the last bits and bobs to be done from the snagging list, some of which may well involve a couple of days in the paint dock next week, as the weather is just too damp for successful touching-in outside.