This month we look at Amazon’s book reader, the Kindle. Part 1
It seems to be this year’s most popular gift judging by the number of people that have asked for help with setting it up, connecting it to WIFI, changing the default country etc. so this month I thought we would spend some time looking at this great little 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 designed to enable you to carry around your library of books, letting 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.
There are two ‘flavours’ of Kindle, the WIFI version or the more expensive 3G version, the WIFI version, as its name suggests, requires that you have an Internet connection with WIFI at the location that you want to download your books, most people have WIFI Internet at home so this version will suit most of us. For those that want instant access to books anywhere, the 3G option is a little more expensive but will allow you to download your books anywhere there is a 3G signal – this is what mobile phones use to connect to the Internet so it’s pretty much anywhere.
Some people wonder whether it’s necessary to be connected to the Internet permanently while you are reading a book using your Kindle, well there’s good news on that count, once you have downloaded a book or magazine, you don’t need to be connected to the Internet any longer, the download is stored permanently on your Kindle.
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.
Something that many of my customers have trouble with is that their new Kindle is automatically registered to amazon.com and therefore when they try to purchase books they are automatically offered titles from the American store in dollars and although it’s perfectly fine to purchase books and magazines in this way, it is likely to incur currency conversion charges with the credit card used and given that most of us have a UK credit card linked to our Amazon account it is usually much easier to buy our products in UK Sterling.
It’s a reasonably simple a process to change the country that your Kindle is registered to – all you need to do is to go to your Amazon account page and update your Kindle profile to show your country as the UK – you will need to register a UK address in order to do this, however again most of us have an address back in good old blighty that we can use for this type of purpose.
It can take up to 10 minutes for this change to update on Amazon’s system so don’t be worried if the store on your Kindle doesn’t update straight away – after that when you browse for books on your Kindle you will be offered books from the UK store in Sterling rather than dollars.