I’ve always liked the idea of an ebook reader, but as the technical and non-fiction books that I usually read weren’t available in the Kindle store and PDF support was so crap on its competitors none of them were really offering what I was looking for when I checked early last year.
Anyway I decided to take another look and see what’s changed and discovered the Kindle DX, it has a 10-inch screen and has been specifically optimised for reading the kind of books that I love, but not only that the Kindle store is now jam packed with technical and non-fiction titles. At $489 it’s not cheap, but compared to the time I waste trying to source books normally it will have paid for itself within six months.
It’s going to be sooooo good being able to instantly get my hands on the title I’m after, as the kind of books that I read are often difficult to source back home, here in Phnom Penh I have no chance. So currently when I want a title I have to either order it from Amazon and wait for it to eventually turn up (sometimes weeks later) or try and source the ebook (by any means possible ;-).
In Phnom Penh you can take a PDF ebook to a copy shop and in two days they will make a bound copy which looks nearly identical to an original, this is good but still takes time and now more often than not the book is only available for Adobe Digital Editions which is doubly crap as I have to read on a screen and it Digital Editions isn’t available for Linux so I have to use Windows.
Amazon seem to think it will be here on Monday (I’ll believe it when I see it). I’ll follow up on this post then and hopefully will be saying that it’s everything I hoped it would be!
