This month we look at Amazon’s book reader, the Kindle. Many of you received one from Santa – I know because I have been asked by loads of people how you do various things with it like connecting it to WIFI, changing the default country etc. So I thought I would dedicate the next couple of months to looking at this popular device.
The Kindle, for those you that don’t know what I am going on about, is a sleek graphite looking tablet device that is dedicated to allowing you to carry around your library of books, enabling you to read pretty much whatever you like on the move. It’s certainly the easiest way to carry around 100’s of books if you like to read whilst you travel.
It connects to the Internet either by WIFI or 3G, the WIFI version requires that you have an Internet connection with WIFI at the location that you want to download your books. The 3G option is a little more expensive but will allow you to download your books from pretty much anywhere.
Once you have downloaded the book that you want to read, you don’t need to be connected to the Internet in order to read the book.
The Kindle uses an anti-glare 6” screen to display text from whichever book you have chosen to read, the words are displayed in the screen using ‘electronic ink’ that uses a contrast that makes it very easy on the eye to read – certainly nothing like reading from a computer screen. Due to the technology used the screen refresh rate is very slow, meaning the battery life is phenomenal – easily lasting days of book reading.
One thing that Kindle users complain about is that the device comes with no companion software. There is however third party software that fills this gap, the best looks to be ‘Calibre’ – marketed as the ‘one stop solution to all your ebook needs’, it provides the Kindle with a feature rich and more importantly FREE ebook management application.
Not only does Calibre allow you to search through and create a library of your books (for example it’s easy to see all of the books you have from a specific author), it enables you to automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into an ebook and upload it to your Kindle, so for example Calibre would enable you to download a daily copy of the Guardian onto your Kindle.
If you would like to know more then there are loads of tutorial videos on the Calibre website at http://calibre-ebook.com
Next month we look at what else you can do with your Kindle, including playing games!
I hope you have found it useful, remember that you can see all of our articles on our website at www.bluemoonsolutions.es/articles