Amazon Kindle

Last week I bought myself a Kindle. (3rd edition I think). I read Shadow Fox by Ashley J.Barnard (note - on the amazon.co.uk site, her name is listed a "Ashley Barnard" for this book) on Kindle for iPhone and I was surprised how well it worked - I'd always thought the small screen would negatively affect the experience, but it didn't seem to.

Anyway, when Fox Rising (listed on amazon.co.uk as Ashley J.Barnard) came out, I decided to throw myself fully into the experience and buy a Kindle and read it on that.

Well, I must say that generally, I am impressed. Being an iPhone user, it's a little frustrating that you can "swipe" the screen to turn pages, but this is a minor issue that I soon adjusted to. The only other thing I'm not a great fan of is the fact that there are no numbers on the keypad. To get numbers, you have to use the symbol menu. Again, a minor thing, but a little annoying.

That said, I'm enjoying using it. It can sync your position in a book back to the Kindle.com server so that when you switch devices it updates your other device with your current position (you can choose not to accept the new position and carry on where you were), but they work well together. The kindle (and kindle apps) record your position using an arbitrary numbering system (which may be paragraph numbering, but I'm not yet certain), so it doesn't matter about the screen size you're reading on as it syncs the location and not page number.

Also, when you buy the kindle, Amazon give you an email address (usually yourname@kindle.com) which is editable, so you can email PDF's etc to the device. The zooming functions for A4 PDF's isn't brilliant, but it's acceptible you'd be better off re-PDFing the document in a smaller page format for the best effect.

My only concern is the number of books that are being published on the Kindle (or lack of). Many mainstream books are still not available on the Kindle - is this because of the contractual hold that the publishers have over the authors ? I noticed that some books actually cost more (on Amazon) for the kindle than for the printed book. I appreciate that the authors get more return on ebooks, but do they need to maintain the same (or higher) pricing for them. At least the smaller, lesser known authors are getting an opportunity to get something out there at a minimal cost.