Kindle Is a Gift

I received a Kindle 2 as a gift from my daughter and her husband. I'm impressed with it, and not ready to declare the death of bookstores and libraries.

The first purchase I made was Alan Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence". It's a good example of a book I'll read once. I can save a tree and my own shelf space by reading the book electronically. I made the book purchase decision the same way I browse our public library or Barnes & Noble. The Amazon.com Kindle Store allowed me to download a free sample of the text. I liked the book, and bought it.

Greenspan's book is a memoir. The sample provided is the "Introduction". He starts the book with a well-written story, his experience of September 11, 2001, when his flight to Washington, D.C., was ordered to return to Zurich. I am just as interested in his experience of economics during my lifetime, and his introduction suggests it will not be a dry story.

The Kindle Store has free books, others cost as little as 99 cents. Most current titles and those on the best seller lists are $9.95.

I downloaded a free selection called, "The Game of Logic", by Lewis Carrol. I recalled that Carrol had published a 19th Century periodical for young people that included games of logic. I haven't spent much time with it, but what I read can be useful for proofreading your own blogs. Ask yourself if your text says what you mean.

While in Chicago I had browsed the shelves of a used bookseller, and saw a dog-eared copy of a book of Ovid's poetry. The Kindle Store had several variations that I had not seen elsewhere. For $2.39, the book I bought included translations by Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Chaucer. Those more familiar with ancient works might have expected it, but for me it was an unexpected find.

Not everything I found in the Kindle Store was what I wanted. I ordered a free trial subscription to Investor's Business Daily. I was familiar with the print edition and the online edition, and had paid hundreds of dollars for an annual subscription. I dropped my subscription a few years ago to try other publications. The Kindle edition is $5.99 a month. Unfortunately, the content was not what I expected, not the same sets of daily charts and graphs I wanted. Canceling my free trial the same day was no problem.

Most useful, we can use the Kindle and our PC's in tandem to work with the Kindle Store and manage the Kindle itself.

Kindle is more expensive than gifts we usually exchange. I was reluctant to buy Kindle myself, because I wasn't convinced that I would pay to read electronic books with such a device. Much of what I read in USA Today, and heard on CNBC was negative about the profitability to Amazon.com. Negative news about Amazon came again as Apple released the iPad a couple of weeks ago.

I gave the Kindle a day-long test from our hotel room at the Palmer House in the Chicago Loop. Charging the battery took three hours. The brief printed instructions that came with the Kindle said I could register the product online, and I could browse and make purchases from the Kindle Store on Amazon.com while the battery was charging.


First I explored the electronic User Guide. I already had an account on Amazon.com, so registration of the product was easy. More than twenty five years ago I bought my first IBM PC, and quickly learned the importance of "Read the manual!" One of my 3M coworkers chastised me for failure to learn MS-DOS before using the PC. How many PC users remember the disaster that was the DBase II User Guide, probably the poorest ever written? The Kindle electronic User Guide is easy.


My understanding was that AT&T wireless service was required to use the Kindle online. The signal in our 18th floor hotel room was at maximum strength, five bars, and not a hint that it was AT&T providing the service. Amazon manages the service.

Here at home in Little Marais, on the North Shore of Lake Superior, AT&T has minimal, sporadic service, but there is a cell phone tower with AT&T on it a mile to the west. I get only three bars signal strength, but that's good enough. I don't have a service contract with AT&T, and we don't need it to use Kindle. Our Internet service provider is Verizon National Access Broadband.


I have much more to learn about the Kindle 2. Occasionally, I download PDF files to the PC. Kindle provides a USB cable to transfer such files from the PC to the Kindle. It's the same cable that charges the battery, and the power plug pulls apart from the USB connector. I didn't know such a cable existed.