International Kindle: Okay e-book reader, good e-newspaper reader
Posted by Simon Crisp | Filed under Interwebs, Personal
It’s been a couple of weeks since an intrigued UPS guy delivered my shiny white Kindle “What are these things?” he asked, “I’ve been delivering loads of them all morning.”
When I told him, he instantly lost interest, “So it’s just for reading books” he muttered as he disappeared down the corridor, carrying another two familiar brown Amazon boxes — I couldn’t tell if he’d recognised this meant he wouldn’t be carrying any more heavy books to these addresses.
Okay so first things first. Yes Amazon should have released it in the UK far earlier. Yes it is beginning to look like dated technology and yes they have crippled the ‘international’ version by removing features like the albeit rather crappy web browser (unless you are addicted reading dubious facts).
It’s also annoying buying everything in dollars, especially when you are as mathematically challenged as me and the pound is doing belly flops off the high-diving board.
If that wasn’t enough Amazon have obviously noticed the little ’sucker’ stickers we Brits have on our foreheads and added 30% onto the price of the books they are willing to sell us. By which I mean the measly selection of the ones US customers get to pick from.
While this can be navigated by a proxy server, downloading to your computer and transferring by USB, you will be hard pushed to do that in the magic 60 seconds a certain Mr Bezos keeps going on about.
You might think you can tell where this review is going… but no, I am loving my Kindle.
While I have only bought one book from Amazon, I uploaded 50 classics I have been meaning to read, (easily downloaded from Feedbooks) and anyway, for me the killer feature is getting newspapers delivered to me each morning.
I love newspapers, but I rarely buy them. For years (while working as news editor at NTI) I had every national sat on my desk when I got to work. Since then I have grown to begrudge handing over cash for a paper filled with content which is free online.
But the idea of getting them on the Kindle kindle appealed to me. Each morning I could have a newspaper sat on my bedside table waiting for me to wake up (add a coffee machine and I could marry it). To an extent this is what I got, though annoyingly the international version means newspapers are stripped of pictures.
Either way I have spent more money on newspapers in the past few week than the past 12 months — and as a hack that can’t be a bad thing.
