Bought Amazon Kindle for E-Book reading

I was looking for a e-book reader device for my reading purpose, because I am not comfortable reading in the laptop screen. I went to know about Amazon Kindle device and I was looking for buying it. It’s an awesome device for e-book reading experience. But from Bangladesh it’s very hard to buy online. Paypal is not available and international transaction is also not available in our country. If I somehow manage to buy it, there is no way to bring the device to our country.

The only solution was to buy it online, then ship it to any country that supports shipping by amazon.com and someone is there whom I know. Then bring the device by any of those guy’s. Bring it by postal service is not secure in Bangladesh and if somehow it reaches to Bangladesh, the customs department will do extra charge to release it. It’s so much pain 🙁

One of my friend lives in America and some days ago I asked her if anyone is coming in Bangladesh recently. And I got positive result. Then I bought it from amazon.com with the help of one of my friend who lives in Australia. Then I shipped it in New York within two days with the help of 1 month free trial of Amazon Prime pack. It shipped to that address within two days and that guy came to Bangladesh and I managed to collect the device from him. That’s the story in short 😛

I loved the most is the electronic ink paper screen. It just feels like I’m reading on paper. When I opened the box, I saw the kindle with instructions in the screen. You can also see this in the picture. I thought it was a paper with instruction was pasted on the screen and I wanted to remove it. But pressing the screen did nothing 😛 . After switching the device ON, it vanished. Then I came to know it was not any paper, it’s the screen. lol

As I said, reading in kindle is like reading in paper. The battery runs ONE MONTH with a single charge, as it is said in the spec. I was wondering how is it possible? After getting the kindle, I know it’s possible for kindle. Because, when a new page comes to display, it flashes a bit and draw the page on the screen. Whatever the content is, may be it’s text or image. But holding that drawing, no external power is needed. That means, only power is needed when drawing the page, after it there is no need of power. After you turn off kindle, it shows a random picture of any famous writer and it doesn’t need any power. Wonderful, isn’t it? 😀

This device supports PDF as well as an e-book format besides the kindles own AZW format and also MOBI format. Kindle has a text to speech feature, but this feature doesn’t work in PDF documents. You can increase/decrease the font size, make bold or thin, increase/decrease line height or anything. You can also rotate the screen if you feel comfortable. The only thing I saw as a drawback for mine is that, text size of PDF documents can’t be make bigger, only it can be zoomed. But it has only 150%, 200% and 300% zoom level. Font size in fit-to-width feature is small and in 150% it becomes a scrolling page and I hate to scroll 🙁

The solution is to use Calibre, it converts PDF to it’s native supported format. I use *.mobi as the format, but the problem is: it breaks the formatting of the original document. I am searching for any solution that it will resize the PDF document without removing the formatting.

It can play mp3 files and the sound quality is pretty cool, also it has a headphone port. My kindle has wifi for connecting to the Internet, but I didn’t tested it yet as I don’t have any wifi network. Otherwise besides the PDF issue of mine, it’s really a great device 😀

It costs total $155 ( $139 kindle + $12 tax + $3 shipping charge). Here is some pictures 😀 (click to view large)