Kindle arrives

I received my Kindle on Friday lunchtime. At first, I thought that I was missing a cable, but it turns out that the power cord is one of those new-fangled dual-function cables which serves as both USB and power cable. My first act upon arriving home was to connect the Kindle to mains electricity via the USB charger.

After a few hours, I became inquisitive as to whether the Kindle was fully charged (apparently not) and whether I could use it. After a fair amount of scratching my head and looking at web sites, I was just about to write to a technical support site when I noticed another post in which someone wrote about having problems turning the Kindle on. "One has to turn the Kindle on?", I asked myself. I then had a close look at the user guide (which is on the web and on the Kindle, but of course I couldn't access the Kindle version yet) and discovered that there is a recessed power button. I pressed the button and the Kindle came to life. I laughed for about five minutes.

Once I crossed this minor hurdle, I saw fairly quickly how to use the controls. There are still some things which I haven't learnt yet but I'm sure that I'll catch on quickly. I connected the Kindle to my computer and loaded all the books which I have stored in preparation for this great event. Then I was indeed able to read books.

Two observations: one can sort the books by title, by author or by last loading date. It would be more useful if I could sort by last access date. I will have to see whether this is possible.

Secondly, most books - even if they were originally PDF files - converted well and are readable. It seems that the PDFs aren't as navigatable as the MOBI files, as they are lacking chapters. I had converted the PDF text to my current MBA course to MOBI and looked at this on the Kindle. When the text was pure text, then it was easily readable, but tables and formulae came out in a wrong format and are useless. Reading the finance text was very difficult, so I think I'm not going to bother with this again. On the other hand, my next MBA course will be 'Negotiation', and I imagine that this will be mainly text so it should be readable.

Early days yet, but the machine seems promising.