Blog ala Vidar

SQL, AppFrame and other cool technologies

Amazon Kindle

I got my new Amazon Kindle yesterday and I LOVE IT! Don’t know what this is? It’s a device for reading books. And, why not use good old books? Well, first of all, the ones that I’m reading (typically SQL Bibles with 1500 pages) weigh about 15 tons, are about 1×1 meter etc, so reading books like that in bed just doesn’t happen. Having a little device that weighs 250 grams is therefore much more convenient. At the moment my device stores 40 books, and it’s only using about 10% of the available storage. I’ve got the Kindle 3 3G and Wi-Fi, but don’t think I’ll ever need the 3G functionality. Anyways, it’s nice to be able to download new books if you’re sitting at a place without any Wi-Fi, and don’t have to pay for it. Yes, you heard correct. You don’t pay anything for 3G traffic. You DO pay for the books you download though.

So, why do I love this little device? I’ve thought about reading (technical) books for a looong time, but since they’re so inconvenient to hold, I haven’t got to it. Also, I’m already WAY to much from my computer-screen, and my eyes really don’t like to read on computer-screens. The Kindle has a technology called E Ink, which is much easier on your eyes, and a cool “side effect” is that it only uses power to switch page. This means that when you’re reading a page, it’s not using any battery, or at least very little.

The Kindle also makes it quicker to buy books. On Amazon.com you can buy a book, and send it to your Kindle, with ONE click. Not like “Click Once”, where you click 4-5 times, but actually ONE click. There’s a big collection to pick from, including their free ebooks. If you’re thinking about buying this, you can download and install the Kindle application for Windows and check it out.

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