No *; No; Yes; and no. The MP3 player is kinda crappy though (it's an "experimental" feature in Kindle jargon). It can also read your books aloud to you in perhaps the most frightfully uninflected voice imaginable. * Well, you can access it--via "experimental" web browser--but you can't download.
I've always hated trying to read PDFs on my Kindle, Sony or DroidX....but they are awesome on my new Xoom!!! (so is the web-browsing experience!).
I just downloaded all the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners from 1940-2010! Code: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EVMDXVR6 or http://hotfile.com/dl/108884469/7c95d00/PulPriFic_C.rar.html
Who said Kindle will die like the rest? 5/19/11 The Dematerialization of the Book - Congratulations Amazon/Kindle! "The Kindle by Amazon has been selling well for a while, but it has now passed an important milestone: "By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books - hardcover and paperback - combined." "Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly - we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years," said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com."
In terms of only reading, the Kindle (or any other black and white ereader) is the best choice. The reason is that the Kindle doesn't have a back light nor a refreshing rate when your just reading a page. This is better for the eyes and better for people with epilepsy.
Trust me when I say the kindle is doing just fine, especially with the super price drop. I don't live in a rich area but i see several people with a kindle every day, and not the same people either.
Creating the free ap for the droid and apple smart phones was a brilliant idea. I dont even have a kindle but have bought several ebooks over the last couple years. I love the way it synchs between my phone, IPAD, and IPOD. I can start reading something on my phone, then open the kindle ap on my IPAD later and continue reading from where I left off.
Looks like I was wrong, because Amazon kept improving the device AND dropping its price... Kindle Fire is coming out in November for $200, I might just buy one. It is a 7 inch tablet with its own browser... "Until today Kindle prices started at $114, but now Amazon has slashed the price of a basic Kindle to $79. Amazon also introduced today the Kindle Touch, a black-and-white Kindle with a touchscreen that sells for $99, and the Kindle Touch 3G, which has free 3G wireless service and costs $149." I bought a chepo Chinese ereader for I think $60 a year ago. Its 5 inch screen was too small, basicly I had to keep pressing the pageturn button all the time. Now Kindles under $100 or even $80 suddenly seem quite inexpensive....My only concern is if I can put my own ebooks on it, no copyright crap asked....
So in 5 years the device dropped from $400 to $80 and I think even today's basic Kindle reader is a 2nd generation, thus more improved, than the original was... Actually, for $250 I could buy a 10 inch netbook, so for internet and such (I am not that fond of touch screens) I would still get the netbook, if I didn't have one. But for just ereading, the $80 price is a steal... I have just checked, that one is still just 6 inch, could be too small. For those who have used it, did you find it sufficient size?
Hm, looks like I have to pass on the cheapest one, because I don't plan to buy books. I just want to read my ebook collection from the PC: "I have the Nook touch and tried the new Kindle. So far there is no way to read Nook books on the Kindle. It also doesn't have a micro sd slot. My Nook can take up to 32gb of sd card storage and I can read Kindle books on it by booting into the Android desktop and launching the Kindle book reader app. " The storage on the cheapest one is 1.25 gb, very small indeed. I will just save this URL here, explaining how to use Kindle with freebooks: http://consumerist.com/2009/07/how-to-load-up-your-kindle-with-non-amazon-ebooks.html
There are complicated ways to remove the copyright protection, or you could just find the kindle version of your nook e-books on-line somewhere and not feel bad about stealing it because you already paid for them once.
For one, I don't feel bad because of not paying for books. For second: "any public libraries across the USA are using Overdrive, a DRM system that allows one to check out ebooks and other digital media. Sony, Nook, iPad everyone BUT the Kindle can use the Public Library system."
$10 is cheap for a hardcover/New release, and I see as many ebook readers as I do books nowadays. You can find many digital books a lot cheaper than $10. There is also the people who upload their books from bit torrents, etc. Support the artist, buy the book. I will miss 2nd hand bookstores though.
I seldom read brand new books. They are usually years or even decades old, so I could get them from the library anyway. I don't see a difference between borrowing them from the library or torrenting them. That being said, I also read non-English books that are hard to get/find in the USA. So an ereader that has no DRM would be a must for me....
Nook color is $250, Sony reader is $240 and they are both better than the Kindle Fire. If I really want one, I think that extra 40-50 bucks is worth the quality upgrade....
I own both a Kindle and a Kobo and never buy books for them. I just download pdfs from the internet to a computer, store them on a usb drive, and then squirt the files over to the e-readers when I want to read them. Both devices come with usb cables and it's easy to do. The computer perceives the e-readers as usb drives and you move files around as usual. The beauty of that is that there's an endless supply of free pdf content on the net. Google Books has literally thousands of free downloads. Most of them are old off-copyright books from the 1850-1920 period. It includes pretty much all of Stanford University's library holdings of books published in those years, along with content from many other American university libraries. No end of academic titles. That's probably not very helpful for people interested in science (which changes rapidly), but my interests are more along the lines of religious studies, philosophy, classics and history. I've found no end of sometimes very famous titles that are easily the equal of things written today. I grabbed the first two volumes of the Cambridge Medieval History the other day for example, as well as the full translated text of several Indian Buddhist texts, along with modern and ancient commentaries. I have introductions to Pali and Sanskrit along with dictionaries, and there's lots of free content in those languages to read if I ever develop a reading knowledge. I must have picked up several hundred very scholarly and in several cases very famous books about early Greek philosophy as well. The Greeks and medievals are well covered, with both primary and secondary literature. Your local library will probably give you access to journal databases that will allow you to freely download contemporary journal articles to your e-reader. Many university professors' websites include links to pdfs of their own articles, along with class handouts, readings and all kinds of specialized materials in many cases. And for those with elastic ethics, determined web-searchers can probably find pirated pdf versions of just about any in-print contemporary English language book for free out there somewhere. So in my case, I find that I've bought the e-readers (I got the Kobo for a small fraction of its list-price at a Borders liquidation sale), but I rarely if ever use the book-sales services that the e-readers' sellers want me to use. I have upwards of 1,000 free books already, download more all the time, and that's enough to hold me for years.
