Kindle 2 Rocks!

Well I broke down and bought a Kindle 2. I was thinking about waiting for a color display, but I figured that would probably be a very long wait so I ordered it from Amazon on Monday or so and yesterday it arrived. I had it charged up in no time and was downloading books to practice with it. So far I have a zillion works by G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, a couple of computer books which I uploaded as pdf files for the Kindle folks to convert to Kindle format and send back to me at ten cents a book. I also downloaded a copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible. Just all kinds of stuff out there if you're into classics. More contemporary stuff is more expensive but still cheaper than hardcover.

So far I'm thrilled with it. It is easy to read. I'd like a little more contrast but it's good enough. The Whispernet that lets you connect with the web is fascinating and adequately fast to do reasonable things. I think the pricing for newspapers is way too high given that they are much harder to read well in the Kindle format, especially the kinds of things that would interest me which would be financial data and graphs and things like that.

As a lark I uploaded one of my shroud papers but the transformation killed a lot of the pictures leaving them black blots -- so the conversion isn't perfect.