Reviews Blogged

This review is not about the specs of a particular Kindle model. It is about how I use my Kindle (which happens to be a Kindle DX) on a daily basis and how it has benefited my working life.

On average I read a tech book per month. I would normally buy my books from Amazon or occasionally head out to my local Borders (which has since closed) or Waterstones store and have a browse through their shelves.  When ordering from Amazon the titles would normally take two or three days to arrive. I like to read tech manuals cover to cover occasionally skimming chapters which are of little interest to me. As I progress through a book I make short notes on the inside front cover so I can reference pages of interest at a later date. As a programmer I need to reference things I have read all the time. Sure Google is wonderful for quick searches and snippets of code I can rip but all too often I find myself digging through my tech library of books trying to track down something I have read in the past. My hand writing has always been terrible (give me a keyboard over a pen always) and when I jot down my notes balancing a book on my knees the output is often an illegible squiggle. First I have to remember what book it was that I actually read in the first place which contains a distant memory of a piece of information that may possibly help me with whatever project I am currently working on. Then I check my often illegible squiggles inside the cover and hopefully find what I’m looking for. That was all before I purchased my Kindle. I had been looking into Kindles for a while. What put me off was the size of their screens. A mere 6 inch display just seemed too small for my usual reading which could contain screen shots of code or workflow diagrams. I held out until the Kindle DX was released in the UK at the end of January 2010. The DX boasted a bigger screen so I treated myself to my very first ebook reader. Read the rest of this entry »