Hands on with the International Kindle

As soon as Amazon announced the International Edition of Kindle 2, I ordered one. After 20 days or so wait, the Kindle arrived. For me, as I live outside the US, the Kindle was a major curiosity. It was neatly packaged in a beautiful box, with a cute “Once upon a time…” tag-line on the side. My first reaction when I got it is that I was expecting the screen a bit bigger. I tried to peel of the instructions on how to set it up from the screen, but of course there wasn’t some there: It was the magnificent Electronic Paper display.

The first “disappointment” was that the Kindle shipped with a US power-supply, instead of a UK or even an EU one. Of course it charges from USB, but you don’t want to carry a laptop with you on holidays (ok, ok, a generic USB charger will do, but can’t I complain?). Once it booted, the 3G interface picked up signal and the Kindle was ready to be used for the first time. I registered the Kindle to my Amazon.com account, and a welcome letter was instantly downloaded.

I bought 1-2 books, and they were downloaded quite fast, they are ebooks anyway so no real hurry. The screen is excellent for reading, it is very sharp and big enough although I find contrast to be a bit poor. The battery life is just excellent. I tried the text-to-speech function, the voice is pretty understandable, but I don’t think I’ll use that. Something I really liked was the very good integration with the dictionary application. You navigate via the 4-way stick to the word you don’t understand, and the dictionary definition pops at the bottom of the screen with the explanation. Pretty good. Annotations are lovely as well, especially if you are reading a scientific paper or a technical book. Also, surprisingly, the web browsing is working. Of course, you have only access to Wikipedia, but that’s pretty good. Of course I’d love to have access to other news websites such as BBC or CNN, but I guess that would lengthen the roaming data bill for Amazon. Additionally, there are tons of free literature for the Kindle (if anyone cares, Greek are displayed fine on the Kindle), just googling “free kindle ebooks” gives you a ton of results.

Now the bad things. What I really don’t understand is WHY the Kindle book editions are as expensive as the paperback editions. Isn’t it cheaper to deliver e-books? Correct me if I am wrong, but you’re saving tons of paper + ink and transportation costs. WHY the Kindle books are at the same price? Additionally, there is no PDF support for the small kindle (native PDF support is in the Kindle DX, but no international edition yet). Of course you can use the free Amazon conversion service, but it messes up the images. The text is readable tho, but if you’re looking at scientific papers, diagrams are also a must.

Overall, I am pretty happy with it and I recommended it to anyone who is looking to buy an ebook reader. So far it saved me a lot of printing, as I just copy the article directly on the Kindle and just look at the diagrams in the computer screen. Oh! Don’t forget to also buy the Kindle’s leather case!