Kindle First Impressions

I got my Kindle Keyboard at Christmas, so I’ve been using it for around 9 weeks now. So, it’s time to share my impressions as a new Kindle user. I think most of the things I like about my Kindle are probably true of most other brands or e-readers as well, but I only have experience with the Kindle.

What I like about it so far:

1. I love the size and weight of it. It’s easy to hold in one hand if I want. The screen is a perfect size for reading in my opinion, probably because it is close to paperback book sized. I have both the Kindle and Nook aps on my Android phone and I almost never use either of them to read with because the screen is so tiny, I’m almost constantly scrolling. How easy it is to hold is the major feature that surpasses paper books in my opinion. Especially if you like long-ish books like I do. Have you tried to lay on your side and read a big honking book? There’s no comfortable way to do it. The size also makes taking it everywhere with you much easier than a paper book most of the time.

2. The e-ink screen. Speaking of screens, I also like the e-ink screen much better than the bright screen on my phone, or trying to read on my computer. Again, it is much closer to the experience of reading a paper book, and is much easier on my eyes. I have almost no eye strain reading ebooks this way. I suppose it might be nice to be able to read in bed without another light on, but I think I’d rather have to add a night reading light than to be forced into a backlit screen all the time. I can also read outdoor in the sun with no problems at all. 

3. The battery lasts forever. Since I’m famous in my household for letting my phone die because I forget to charge it, I find it very handy to almost never need to charge up my Kindle. My understanding is that if I leave the WiFi turned off, the battery lasts even longer, but I know I’ve forgotten to turn it off more than once and still, I’ve never had the battery die on me. I’m usually ready to plug in to add a new title well before I need to plug in just for charging.

4. I can add my own files. Amanda over at A Fortnight ofMustard turned me on to this great usage. I can add my own drafts to read over as I edit. I can add notes as I read, and having the document on a different screen lets me see mistakes that I may not otherwise catch. I do usually have to convert my files to a .mobi format since most pdf files I have are a little harder to read on the Kindle, but it hasn’t been hard to do the conversion so far, and I’m a tech dummy. Reading pieces for my writer critique groups is one of the main things I use my Kindle for.

5. The note making feature. See above. It’s very handy for my own pieces, and those I’m critiquing for others. I almost never make notes in novels I’m reading for pleasure, but I know some folks like that kind of thing. In fact, there is a feature that lets you highlight text, and see what lines have most often been highlighted by other Kindle users. I had to figure out how to turn that off, since I found other people’s highlights to be distracting and annoying as I read.

Things I don’t like:

1. The buttons on the side. I have to be very careful when I want to hold the Kindle in one hand, because I’ve pushed the side buttons many times when I didn’t mean to. Then I have to try to figure out if I accidentally moved forward or backward in my text, and how far I went. Also, the buttons were slightly unintuitive for me. For quite awhile I would hit the button on the right to go forward a page, and the one on the left to go back a page. That isn’t how it works though. There is a large and small button on each side. The large one goes forward, the small one goes back, no matter what side it’s on. Now that I’ve used it more I’ve gotten the hang of it and almost never mess it up anymore. In fact, being able to go forward or back without changing my hold is starting to grow on me. But it was a learning curve.

2. I can’t give a book to a friend when I’m done. This is a big hot button topic in the ebook world in general I think.  I know I’ve seen it mentioned many times as one of the reasons some people feel ebooks should cost less than paper books. My solution for the moment is not to by the ebook version of a title I know I’m going to want to hand off to my husband or my mother when I’m done with it. For example, my husband and I are both reading the Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett. When ‘The Daylight War’ comes out, no matter how tempted I am to download and read it right away, I will buy a physical book to share with Robert. 

So those are my early impressions. I also feel like I’m actually reading more since I got my Kindle than I did before, even though I still mainly read paper books. After all, I still have a bookcase full of titles I haven’t gotten to yet. Maybe this is the excitement of having a new gadget to play with; maybe it’s all the pieces I’m reading for critique (I very rarely did this before since I didn’t like to read on my computer screen). I think it’s too early to tell for sure. I keep a reading journal, so later on, maybe after 6 months or a year, I’ll be better able to compare my total reading volume.

We Get to Look Forward to a New J.K. Rowling Book

That news, that I read at Tor.com was exciting enough, but there was even more surprises in that announcement for me. The book will not be a Harry Potter book, and it will be aimed at adults. That’s really all the information that she has released so far, but it makes me very happy for a number of reasons.

First, I love the  Harry Potter books, so therefore, Rowling is one of my favorite authors. So really, anything new from her I’d want to read. I was worried that she may not write much more after the Potter series ended. I mean, she had a few small, related books like Beedle the Bard, etc., so I expected some other things in the same vein, but this is supposed to be something completely new.  

Furthermore, she doesn’t HAVE to write any more. She must be all set, really. Therefore, she must WANT to write more, and that makes me happy.  

I also imagine after such an enormously successful series, it would take real bravery to start something brand new. The amount of attention and expectations for anything she’ll write is much greater than other authors have to deal with. Even other fairly famous authors, I would imagine. Good for her!

There are a number of books I’m anxiously awaiting, but this may be the first one that I’ve looked forward to that I knew so little about. And for some silly reason, that makes me happy too.

Origins Blogfest: My Young Writing Life

Over at Cruising Altitude 2.0  DL Hammons has encouraged writers to blog today about how their writing journey began. I signed up to participate. I think I'm actually more interested in reading the entries of other writers, but to keep my end of the bargain, here's my story.

I always enjoyed writing. While going through storage boxes awhile back I found my very first diary. I couldn't read anything in it because I didn't know how to spell back then, or even how to form all of my letters properly. Yet I remember vividly how much I loved writing in that little pink book.

Back in the 9th grade, I decided to do something more productive with my joy of writing, and joined the freshman high school newspaper. My first assignment was to cover a school football game (we lived in West Texas at the time and it felt like 90% of what was in that paper was about school football.) I was very nervous, but I worked hard to get all my 'Whos, Whats, Whens, and Wheres' into my little article. When the paper came out, there was my name on an article. With nervous pride, I read it. It was not my article. No two words matched what I had written. I was heartbroken. The worst part, in my memory, is that I was too shy to talk to anyone else at the newspaper about what had happened. Did they lose my article, and throw this one in instead? Was what I turned in so horrible that it was unprintable? Did they just have to drastically cut my piece for space? I don't know and I was too much of a wimp to ask. I regret that. So instead, I went back to my journal, and gave up writing things for other people to read.

We moved here to California later that same school year. My English class was so crowded, that there were not enough seats for everyone. I, as the new kid, had to sit on the floor. If someone was sick, I got to have their desk for the day. My teacher for the rest of that year gave me a much needed boost to my writing self esteem. I don't' remember the assignment, but I wrote about the night my cat didn't come home, and I sneaked out of the house to look for her. My teacher raved about the story, telling me about her emotional response to what I'd written. That experience went a long way in healing my poor writing ego from the newspaper incident.

To try to cut this a little shorter, let's jump to 2005. After not writing for nearly 15 years, I got a Science Fiction story in my head that I couldn't get rid of. I wrote it up and put it on Writing.com for feedback. Most of the feedback was of the, vague, 'it's pretty good' variety. Though one wonderful reviewer, Bob, tore it to shreds. He explained showing vs telling, and gave me links to writing articles. I was elated! I knew the story had big problems, but I didn't know what they were. Finally someone gave me something useful to work with. I found out that you didn't have to be either a good or a bad writer and that was that. Writing could be learned, and improved. And ever since then, I've been learning all I can.