New Kindle, old books

Amazon was nice enough to send me a new kindle to replace my dead one.
It's been dead for a while, and I had given it up as a wasted $400.
I finally got around to calling them, and they agreed that the old kindle
was dead and shipped a new one here to Mexico, and are even paying the shipping to return the old one to the USA. Amazing Amazon.

The only disappointment was the shipping email said they were sending a
kindle 2, but a kindle 1 showed up. The whispernet doesn't work outside
the US, with a kindle 1 I still need to connect up to a computer and
drag and drop the files. (What drudgery! he complains; instead of being
stuck in the wilds of mexico with just books in espanol to read...I can
buy any book I want with just a cable)

I'll probably start with "the big short" by Michael Lewis, and a book
by Seth Godin, who's blog is a dally read; he's like the Army, he
generates more ideas before breakfast than most people generate all day.

I did cheat and download a book from project gutenberg, just to have
something immediately, and it's the "Three Musketeers". You can't
beat a book by Alexandre Dumas for quick excitement, but the book has
changed since I read it as a boy, now I see Michael York in every scene,
the memory of the movie has overwritten my memories of the book.

Kindle2

My lovely wife bought me a kindle for my birthday and so far I like it.
I can see that if we were in the usa it would be super wow, free wireless
access to at least wikipedia if not more, automatic delivery of newspaper and
magazine subscriptions and downloading books you buy right away without a computer.

Here in europe it's still pretty good as a book reader. To get a book or magazine one
has to download it to a pc, then copy it to the kindle as if the kindle is a memory stick.
My only quibble with that setup, is that they used a non-standard mini-usb connector
on the Kindle. Why do that when I already carry a couple of miniusb cables, now I need
another.

It's pretty cool as a book reader, it allows you to read books with one hand and only
takes a short while to get used to not reading on paper. The battery life is pretty fantastic,
it stays completely charged on standby, and judging by the depletion rate it has around
a 20 hour battery life (at least). My favorite thing about reading with the kindle is it
remembers where you left off in every book, no bookmarks needed, no folding pages over
on a corner (I hate when people do that), and it saves me that time of flipping a page or two
to find out where I left off.

I'm looking forward to going to the usa in the summer to try it out on the net too.