I had been meaning to buy a Kindle for about a year now, but it was the reduction in size (I was never a fan of the keyboard) and the price that did it for me. I ordered it on Monday and had it in my hands by Wednesday.

This is not a review. This is more of a I’ve-spent-a-day-with-this-and-here-is-what-I-think kind of thing. Right out of the box, the screen stands out. It wasn’t until I removed the plastic that I realised that the “plug into your computer” graphic was on the screen and not a picture. I have an iPhone 4, so it’s not like I’m used to turdy screens, but text on this looks beautiful¹². It’s a relief to not be looking at a lighted screen for a change too. Although that means I can’t read it in bed yet, but my lighted cover should be here soon.

Getting content into it took quite a bit of fiddling around. Since the Kindle doesn’t have any settings for proxies, I can’t use it over the university LAN, and the only way to transfer anything is via USB. That means all the cool over-the-air things don’t work. Finding workarounds took a bit of work. I found services like NEWSTOEBOOK which were helpful, but there aren’t many out there that make a .mobi file for you and all the downloadable apps are Windows only. I couldn’t find libraries to create .mobi files either, except for this one which isn’t really complete. I would love to get my hands on whatever Instapaper uses to create its files; I could put it to some really good use.

Over time, this could become pretty valuable once I have a good collection of books. I can see myself buying e-versions of the books I already have just because it’s so convenient this way, like how we transitioned from cassettes to CDs and then MP3s. But this needs to become thinner, and considering my iPhone is about a sheet’s breadth thicker and does so much more, I think a thinner version shouldn’t be that hard. But then again, with the Fire in the picture I think the Touch and Fire will be Amazon’s focus, and I don’t think those two will go much thinner.

Overall, I’m very happy with this, and it gives a swift kick to my reading which I really needed. The moment I had it running, I bought three books that people have been suggesting for a while but I never got around to reading simply because they were a pain to get (including 1984). Plus all the articles I’ve been saving in Instapaper for a year now, putting off reading them for when I had something good to read them on. Longform, here I come.