My Kindle

A couple of Christmases ago, I posted my wish to own a kindle. I finally decided to get one as a birthday gift for me this year. I asked my friend Zenie, who was coming over from UK, to buy it for me so I could save on freight cost. It cost me around S$180. It’s really cheap compared to all tablets because it is solely dedicated for ebooks, which is fine by me, since I already have an iphone if I needed to use the internet or other apps. It can apparently hold more than 3000 ebooks and it is much thinner and lighter than one paperback. How convenient is that?

I had seen a kindle only once before, when I saw a girl reading from it as we were waiting in line for a bus to Ikea. My friend Rey had already told me about its incredible e-ink screen that mimics the look of the pages of a real book, but I couldn’t really appreciate what he was saying until I saw it for myself. The same thoughts I had then once again crossed my mind after Zenie handed me my kindle on the night of my birthday and I powered it on for the first time. In fact it looks so much like paper that during my first few nights with it, I’d catch myself lifting my hand and trying to manually flip the page before realizing that hey, this isn’t a book, and press the right button instead. Yes there’s a button, because the kindle is no touchscreen, and after being used to my iphone reading apps (Stanza ereader, iBooks), this also took some getting used to. I never got much reading done on the iphone, though, because the screen was too small and other apps distracted me and there was also the matter of the iphone’s very limited battery life. While the iphone can’t even remain powered on for an entire day, the kindle can last a couple of weeks.

You can order ebooks from Amazon, which is Kindle’s creator, and they would be delivered to your kindle once you turn on your wifi. My kindle, by the way, is wifi only. There’s also a 3G + wifi one available. If you already have ebooks in PDF file in your computer, you can also read them from your kindle by sending them to your Amazon free kindle email add. In my case, I first change their font to 22 using Microsoft Word and save them as PDF again so that I can read them without having to adjust any viewing settings. I want to keep my 20-20 vision intact, thank you very much. Then out of fun, I decided to make one of my short stories into PDF book form and sent it to my kindle as well, just so I would know how it felt like to see my name as an author in print. Hee.

One more thing I love about the kindle is how it allows you to make annotations on your ebooks. You can just highlight passages that struck you and they would all get saved in a file called “My Clippings” with the book title and page details for your convenient perusal. Since I am such a sucker for quotes, it comes in really handy for me.
I had forgotten to order a case for my kindle, but luckily my huggable friends had bought one for me as a birthday gift. Naturally, the leather cover had to be in purple, my favorite color. I love it! So now my kindle is protected.

Since the e-ink screen has no glare, it also means it has no light for you to read in the darkness. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to get myself one of those cute mini reading lights that I keep seeing in bookstores and novelty shops – once again in purple, of course!

I’m loving the kindle experience so much that I’ve finished reading four books on it already. The bookworm has returned, ready to conquer the library once again. Do let me know your recommended reads in the comments section. 🙂

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