New Kindle available in the UK

Since I am in the London right now, I perked up when I found that the new Kindle from amazon is available in the UK.

Here are some USA links and comments on the Kindle I posted elsewhere.

I have the Kindle 3g which has a keyboard. I was sceptical at first but I have been won over. It is especially useful for books I don’t especially want to keep on a shelf for reference. It is perfect for more ephemeral book. I use it for periodicals. I use both the text and text to voice options. I plug it into my stereo when I am doing chores. The reading is machine-like but it ain’t bad.

Did you know that you can lend books from one Kindle to another? You can highlight something you read on your Kindle and then tweet it to your followers?

The newest Kindles amazon is putting out run on a new technology. There is new generation of Kindle, Kindle Touch, and a new Kindle Fire with color. The Kindle Fire is more like a tablet, like an iPad, and it has a new browser that runs on cloud technology which is apparently very fast.

KindleThe new generation Kindle Touch, however, without a keyboard is 30% lighter and weighs less than 6 ounces and is 18% smaller body but with the same 6″ screen size. It also allows one to borrow books from the local library. Gotta see how that works. [see UPDATE, below]
In any event, if you are going to take the plunge into a Kindle, it might be good to do it now (and do your very early Christmas shopping). I received my Kindle as a gift from a reader here and I have really enjoyed it.

I now have a Kindle wishlist, by the way. Do you?

Did you know you can lend books to another person’s Kindle?

USA only, click HERE to pre-order a Kindle Fire.
To order a simple Kindle Touch HERE or the top end with free 3g HERE. For the Kindle 3G with the keyboard (the one I have now) click HERE.

I did some checking and found that a zillion libraries in the USA, which can lend e-books via Overdrive, can now lend to Kindles. Very cool. I have done this with some library books using Overdrive in the past on my iPad. Having the option for Kindle is great.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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4 Comments

  1. No, not the Kindle. Not until it supports the industry standard ePub format. Amazon is clearly aiming at creating a monopoly, which is bad for consumers.
    And it doesn’t have an external memory card slot, does it? All its competitors do.

  2. acroat says:

    Amazon told me the Fire does not have text to speech-was the rep wrong?

  3. MKubes says:

    It’s simple enough to convert ePub to Mobi with Calibre (a great little program) – they’re both XHTML formats, so it would mean almost nothing to add support for ePub to the next Kindle. But I don’t really see that as a big issue; I have dozens of “ePub” books on my Kindle. No, the only real problem you’ll run into for now is DRM.

  4. Emilio III says:

    As a victim of Amazon’s original e-book swindle, I would hesitate to buy one of their gadgets, though I may be weakening a bit lately.

    Amazon’s original e-books were on pdf format protected by Adobe’s DRM. Then they went on their own, Adobe retired the server(s) handling Amazon’s e-books and they became unreadable. Adobe says it’s not their fault and I should ask Amazon for a new download. Amazon says they do not allow downloads except a couple of months after the original purchase, and they don’t offer that format any more. I should buy a Kindle. If I bought a Kindle, could I exchange the old Amazon e-books for their Kindle versions? You must be kidding! NO!

    !%%!@# bunch of thieves…

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