I have to eat my words. I previously posted a blog entry about how I wasn’t sure I would like the Kindle, but now that I actually have one…I love it!! I love being able to download books and read them right away. There’s no more waiting til the bookstore/library opens and the screen is absolutely amazing! Also I thought the lag between page turns would be annoying, but it isn’t; I really don’t notice it when I’m reading. Plus I love the dictionary feature. You simply point the cursor to a word you don’t know and a definition pops up at the bottom! I like using it for words that I thought I knew the meaning of but I really didn’t. This is so much easier than turning on my laptop/iPod Touch to look things up. I also like the keyboard a lot, the buttons are the perfect size for my fingers and they feel nice to press (is that a weird thing to say?).
My gripes: 1) I wish the screen were a little bit bigger (not much, but a little) 2) I wish I could customize the buttons because I keep getting the “home” key and the “menu” keys mixed up. 3)the lack of touch screen doesn’t bother me at all but the lack of a backlight does. It feels weird to hold an electronic device and have to turn on the light to use it 4) I didn’t appreciate having to pay for the (absolutely necessary) cover. I didn’t purchase it at first because I was too cheap, but then my cat kept stepping on the screen when I wasn’t using it (that’s when it’s nice not to have a touch screen…)
But all in all, I’m pretty happy with it.
PS: My 2 cents on the text-to-speech controversy: Why is everyone so mad? I’m very rarely going to use it. I’ll probably use it more to help me edit my own writing, which is what I use the speech function on my laptop for. The synthetic voices on the Kindle (which granted are slightly better than the ones on my mac) are not as nice to listen to as a real person on an audiobook. If an author wants to disable this feature on his/her books, go for it. But why? I don’t think people who listen to audiobooks would choose to use the text-to-speech function instead of buying an audiobook. Can you imagine driving and listening to the Kindle read a book? That would be annoying (and difficult to hear?). Probably the people who would use the function are the people who wouldn’t have gotten the audiobook anyway. Like people who are in the middle of reading a book but don’t want to have to stop when they’re cooking or cleaning or something.