Kindle Global Wireless Edition

I’ve have to admit that I was never fascinated with Kindle when Amazon first launched it. I have always liked reading from books rather than from computer screens, there is something about the smell and feel of the paper while you run your fingers through the pages that makes reading more enjoyable.

Lately I have been accumulating huge piles of books and can’t seem to find enough room to store them, so I started reading ebooks from my laptop but it’s just not convenient to use it as a reader, so I have been toying around with the idea of getting a Kindle for the past months but up until recently Kindles could only be shipped within the US, so when Amazon came out with the Global Wireless edition, I feign indecision over to buy or not and now it’s here sitting on my desk waiting for the first ebooks to be transfered.

The price tag is a bit high at $259 plus shipping and customs deposit (which if not used would be returned by Amazon after 4-6 weeks.) but I have been buying from Amazon 4-6 times a year and every time spend $200-400 for the cost of the books and about $100-150 to ship it. The last time I did that I had it shipped to a New York based Philippine forwarder because friends have been telling me it’s cheaper and faster, it did come in a week in advance but I almost paid double in shipping costs. Then it got me thinking, I could save about $400-600 a year if I eliminate shipping, plus ebooks are cheaper by 20-40% than some books, so if I spend $300 on a Kindle I’d still save $100-300 a year on shipping alone plus $40-160 every time I buy online.

And another good thing is I don’t have to worry about my bags being deformed because of the weight of the books I carry especially when I travel.

The one I got has a 6inch monochrome display, very slim at 1/3 of an inch and is lighter than most paperbacks. It has wireless 3G although I still have some misgivings about this since the Kindle cannot connect and get my ebook wirelessly. I hope that for future editions they could include wifi and perhaps a colored screen. The memory is only 1.6GB but an ebook is only about 100-200KB so that’s still about 1,500 ebooks.

Since the screen is monochrome or B/W, it saves up on a lot of energy so you can go reading without charging for days. The text-to-speech is a bit better than most, but I doubt I have any use for that.

The have Kindle applications for the iPhone but the text would be too small, I never liked reading from paperbacks simply because they are too small to read, preferring the font size on trade paperbacks or hard bound editions. Just the other day they launched an application for PCs as well and will launch one for Mac and Blackberry too, so if you feel that the $259 investment is too much and you’re not bothered by the size (too big to be really portable on PCs or too small to read on for iPhones) then try downloading the Kindle, oh and you save a lot of trees by shifting to digital too.