charmianland

(partial repost from another one of my blogs)

I’ve been playing around on a Kindle 3, and loaded up various files, including text, mobi, native Amazon files, and images.

Verdict:  Solid for reading novels, and pretty good for comics and images. The web browser is only really useful if you don’t have a smartphone or similar device.

• To be truly portable, I think the Kindle needs a case, or at least a sleeve.
• Some don’t think e-ink is high contrast enough, but IMHO it’s fine, comparable to paperback.
• The lower buttons are tiny and don’t really seem designed for sustained usage.
• Web browser doesn’t default to mobile views. It really should. E-ink is also just not really optimal for viewing the web if you are clicking from page to page all the time. It’s not bad if you are just reading text.
• Calibre works well for conversion.
• Japanese text files display fine, but I wish the only font wasn’t sans-serif. Normally Japanese novels are in ‘regular script,’ meaning that they have the Asian equivalents of serifs. The Kindle only has the sans-serif font.
• Succeeded at using Mangle to convert both images and scanned text.
• Scanned text of a novel is a little small, but legible. I could trim it more to make it larger.
• Comic was a pleasant surprise:  not as nice as a computer screen, but the Ravages of Time has very detailed art, and still, it looked pretty good, very sharp and legible, albeit small. Think of it like reading in bunko form.
• Based on conversation w/ SubD, don’t get a small form factor (6”) ereader or device if you want to look at PDFs with charts or other graphic elements. PDFs just were destined to be read on larger screens. However, this is fairly irrelevant to my usage, although I would also benefit from a larger screen.