One Year with Amazon Kindle

About a year ago I finaly purchased my first Kindle 3 Wifi (later renamed to Kindle Keyboard Wifi). In these days new VAT limit for purchases out of EU was starting to be applied. But I ordered it in time before the final price raised by 20%. UPS delivered the package from US quicker than Czech Post Office is even able to deliver letter from one part of Prague to another (yes, they let you pay for it a lot). In parallel, leather cover was going from China. It took about 2 weeks to the delivery (but the shipping was free of charge).

It had not (and still has not) any sense to purchase Kindle from Czech retailer since the prize is much better and acording to many people on internet, Amazon return services are much better than services of arbitrary Czech e-shop.

Primarily I’ve bought Kindle for school purposes (lecture notes and papers). I refused big Kindle DX because of its price and size, and purchased the small one. I became familiar with it very quickly, even for fictional books reading. After few years, the market with Czech written books finally arises but sometimes books include painful non-Amazon incompatible DRM stuff. Czech (and world’s) classics is available for free from e.g. Municipal Library of Prague. In recent days I fell in love with shopping from Amazon, for both fictional and technical literature. Beside the fact that the price is much better, some books are not even available in Czech Republic.

Pros:

• Size and weight. Now I need not to take big bag with books to a vacation.
• e-Ink display. The most excellent LCD in the world cannot compete with it.
• Amazon Whispernet. In combination with e.g. Send to Kindle Chrome extension, it’s unbeatable for offline articles reading.
• Dictionary integration. For us who do not handle English vocabulary so well.

Cons:

• Inability to open non-Amazon DRMed books. Our local market with DRM protected books lays on Wooky or Adobe DRM technologies.
• Low speed. When using dictionary, switching from book to dictionary and back is a bit slow. Also handling PDF documents is slow.
• Kindle is unable to automatically check for new documents at Whispernet when in sleep mode. So I must remind to wake it before going to work if I manage to read newspaper.