Put a Kindle in the Window: Day 2

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Put a Kindle in the Window: Day 2

POSTED: Friday, June 12, 2009, 3:50 PM

Creepy.

They sent me a Kindle 2 to try out. It's due back in 9 days. This is gonna be just like Crank.

Brought the thing to Fergies last night to get a little reading done before meeting friends. Later, I passed it around. Everybody touched the screen, partly because they were expecting a touch screen, and partly because the Kindle's not very normal.

You remember how when you used to see digital watches on display at, say, KMart, there would be these little plastic pieces stuck to the screen saying 12:34 or what have you? The idea was to make it look like the watch was on without draining the batteries. That's what the Kindle screen looks like. It doesn't look like it's on. In fact, you can't really shut it off, far as I can tell. You just stop fiddling with it and it goes to sleep. The screen doesn't light up. It doesn't sound like there are any fans inside. The Kindle can go 30 hours without charging, which is nice.

Thanks to some tech support from the nice people who sent me the Kindle, I was able to download some books onto the thing (they gave me $30 store credit). I picked up The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. It took about a minute, maybe less, to have it on the device and ready to read. I also downloaded short "free sample" versions of a bunch' of other things, mostly short story collections.

There are somewhere in excess of 300,000 titles available for Kindle plus newspapers and such. That's actually not that high a number. Flipping through the search results for "short stories" I found:

a bunch of literary anthologies, including many current ones: Best American, O Henry, etc.
a ton of things that have been public domain for a long time: Dickens, Hawthorne, Bierce. These were priced cheap, often $.99.
a surprisingly large number of erotic stories collections. Where there's internet there's porn, I guess.

Tomorrow: I read! From the Kindle! This is pretty exciting right? No? Oh.

Posted by Patrick Rapa @ 3:50 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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