Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The perfect boat book

You know that wonderful anticipatory feeling you get when you first crack the cover of a new book?  You've set aside some protected time, you find a comfortable place to settle, provision yourself with the necessaries (some munchies?  a glass of wine?)... and then you open the book and dive in, letting the author take you for a ride.

Well I've been having that feeling a lot lately, and yet Eolian isn't riding any lower in the water.  That's because for my birthday, Jane gave me The Perfect Boat Book®:  A Kindle!  (After 40 years, she so knows me.  Thank you Jane!)


For the cruiser, a Kindle has some wonderful characteristics:
  • It will go months on a battery charge - the only time it uses power is when you turn a page.  In fact, when you open the shipping box, you will find your new Kindle is already displaying the first page of the Users Manual, showing how to plug it in and charge the battery...  It can do this because no power is used to display a page. 
  • Charges from 110VAC or a USB port
  • It can hold literally thousands of books
  • It does not require a connection to the internet (except to obtain new books)
  • As well as buying books from Amazon, you can also download free books from a host of sources, and you can even check out books from your public library
  • It is completely readable in bright sunlight - exactly like a book
(For the cruiser, I think the newly announced Kindle Fire gives up some of these important characteristics - most notably battery life and local storage capacity.)

If you should be gifted a Kindle (or buy one for yourself), you will want a cover for it.  Here's a piece of advice:  Get the cover that Amazon designed for the Kindle.  It is far superior to anything out there.
  • When in the cover, the Kindle is just about the size and thickness of a paperback book - it is very comfortable to hold
  • It contains a cleverly hidden but extensible LED light (draws power from the Kindle - no additional batteries required)
  • The Kindle is attached to the cover - not by clumsy straps which go over the display corners or somewhere, but by two metal clips which engage slots on the left side of the Kindle (aside from attaching the cover to the Kindle, this is how the power gets to the LED).
  • The cover is well-padded and just enough larger than the Kindle that if it were dropped on edge, no damage to the Kindle would result.
So I have The Ideal Boat Guitar®, and now The Perfect Boat Book®!
Share/Bookmark

3 comments:

Lotte said...

I too am a happy owner of a Kindle 3G (keyboard edition) including the cover, and I'm absolutely thrilled about it. It instantly solved my problem with space. Luckily I read a lot in English 'cause there's so many more ebooks in English than there is in Danish!
And loads of them are FREE! I.e. books from the Gutenberg Project.
I downloaded the Calibre programme (freeware) and with that you can convert other ebook formats into the mobi format.
Kindle rocks!

Aaron and Nicole said...

Ditto on loving the Kindle. Nicole and I don't know how we'd cruise without it. Also another neat thing about it is that the 3G works in over 100 countries. When we're anchored out somewhere that doesn't have any wifi signal but is close enough to civilization that there's a 3G signal we use the built in browser to check email, news, etc. It's clunky and slow, but it's free.

Robert Salnick said...

Lotte and Aaron:
I thought I might hear from you guys, since you have both mentioned in your blogs that you have Kindles on board.

Here are some additional sources of free books I have run across so far:

MobileRead.com (look for .mobi books you can download to your computer or download the MobiGuide
and get your books via Whispernet)

Feedbooks.com (books can be downloaded to your computer or if you download their Kindle Guide
you can get your books via Whispernet - they even have a video on how to use the guide)

Manybooks.net (when you download to your computer, look for Kindle format or Mobipocket)

1001Books (download books to your computer or directly from your Kindle browser)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...