Amazon Kindle in Taiwan

I have a Kindle 2 US, nook wi-fi and Kindle 3 wi-fi. I bought the nook for the wi-fi feature shortly before the Kindle 3 was announced. Of the three, I like the Kindle 3 the best by far. The nook interface is much slower and harder to use than the Kindle’s. Doing what should be simple things like look up a word or make notes or highlights are much easier to do on the Kindle, and you can’t do some things at all like zoom an image or organize books into collections on nook. The extra LCD display on the nook seems like a neat feature, but I’ve found that it gets in the way and makes things more difficult to do.The size of the nook is only slightly larger than the older Kindle 2, but is huge compared to the slimmed down Kindle 3. The Kindle 3 solved most of what I disliked about the Kindle 2 with the exception of ePub support. Not only is ePub a more widely accepted industry standard, the formatting support is way better than the aging Mobi format Amazon uses. My main complaint with the Kindle 3 is that the back page/next page buttons are too small.

How sturdy is the packaging? I was going to order it and have it shipped to me directly but the ETA is 7 to 9 WEEKS! So I am probably just going to ask a visiting friend to bring one to me now…

Also, how many of you use the Kindle without a leather case? While the $35 case looks good, I figured that it might be cheaper to just use a pouch or something I will try to find locally.

[quote=“catfish13”]How sturdy is the packaging? I was going to order it and have it shipped to me directly but the ETA is 7 to 9 WEEKS! So I am probably just going to ask a visiting friend to bring one to me now…

Also, how many of you use the Kindle without a leather case? While the $35 case looks good, I figured that it might be cheaper to just use a pouch or something I will try to find locally.[/quote]

I don’t use a case around the house and use a dvd shipping envelope when I take it in a bag. Using a dvd envelope isn’t elegant but, with the bubble packaging inside, offers enough protection until I can get around to ordering a case from Moleskin or Pad & Quill.

Just made the order and a visiting friend will be bringing it to Taipei next week. It was quite a bit nervewrecking when I heard that Amazon was going to ship it to my friend’s via some guys called “Ontrac,” a courier I’ve never heard before. After reading quite a bit of horror stories on Amazon forum and half expecting to have to call Amazon support, I learned that the package arrived fine…so I should be safely getting it in my hands soon /knock on wood

I didn’t order a case though, as I was hoping that cheaper alternatives should be readily available in Taipei.

Got my Kindle a couple of days ago and today I went to Guanghua Digital Plaza in search for a suitable case. I ended up finding a pretty decent looking faux leather one for NT$450 and spent NT$200 to get a screen protector film fitted. Does anyone wanna see some pics?

I am thinking about getting a Kindle but not sure if it’s the right one for me. I hope someone can answer my questions. Does the Kindle have a user replaceable battery? What do you do if there’s a problem, do you have to send it all the way back to Amazon or is there a place here that can fix it? How easy is it to read PDFs? When I read a PDF on my computer my screen will only show half of the page I am reading, when I hit the “jump to next page” button, I won’t see the second half of the page but instead will get the beginning of the next page. Does the Kindle do this as well? I hate having to use the scroll button on my computer when I’m reading a book.
Thanks for any help people can give me.

Most tablet type devices these days do NOT have a user replaceable battery, so yes you would have to send it back to Amazon for any type of service required. However modern batteries are designed to be charged several hundred times with no problem, I’d think, so it would be rare for you to require any type of service.

The Kindle can handle PDFs but you would need to find a way to get them onto the device. You can use the included cable to sync it, or you can email them to Amazon and have them auto sync it to your device for a charge (something like $2 per document). Regarding the scrolling issue, you should be able to set the zoom size both on your computer or on the Kindle to control how much content you see on screen. The font size would be quite small on the 6" Kindle if you want a whole page displayed at one, so chances are you would end up using the scrolling option. If your computer has a larger monitor, take a look at the +/- buttons on top of your PDF reader. You should be able to zoom out enough to get the whole PDF page on one screen.

Thanks for your help. My home screen is big enough that I can display a whole PDF page at a time. I was just wondering about how it works with the Kindle. I’m not sure what you mean by “sync with the included cable”. Does that mean I can just attach the Kindle to my home computer and download PDFs or other books onto it? Also, how does the Kindle handle colour pictures. Does it show the pictures in black and white or does it just show a blank page?

I think the Nook has a user replaceable battery which is one of the things I like about it, but unfortunately you can’t get them in Taiwan.

Again, thanks for your help

The Kindle, as shipped from Amazon, includes a cable connecting it to the computer. That’s how I load PDFs and downloaded magazine subscriptions (via Calibre).

I haven’t yet found a way to make PDFs work well on the Kindle. They’ll display, but they don’t “flow”, so you basically get an A4-sized page scaled down to… small. For most PDFs, the text is too small to read. Yes, you can zoom it and scroll back and forth - like you sometimes have to do online with poorly designed web pages, moving back and forth for every line - but it’s a pain.

I think, that if you want to get a device mainly to work with PDFs, an iPad is probably better.

Pictures usually display in black and white. I haven’t noticed any cases of pictures not displaying, but I haven’t been looking either.

I second that recommendation. Apple’s free iBooks app is VERY slick for handling PDFs. The interface can’t be beat. It’s very intuitive to scroll up and down and turn pages with just a whisk of your fingers, all in full color. Transferring PDFs to your device is already easier, since you can just drag and drop them into a Dropbox folder and have them immediately show up in your iPad without using any cables. You can even open them directly from email, even if they are zipped!

The Kindle is not designed for the battery to be user replaceable, but it isn’t terribly hard to do so if you are at all mechanically inclined.

PDFs are usually mostly usable on the Kindle 3 when read in landscape orientation. The exception is especially small typefaced documents where you’ll need to use zoom which is kind of clunky to use. Also keep in mind that reading PDFs that consist of scanned pages will drain your battery more quickly than with text documents. If you are going to primarily be reading PDF documents, you’ll probably want a larger screen, e.g. Kindle DX or tablet.

Thanks for all the help. I won’t be reading a lot of PDFs on the Kindle so I may still get one. I just wanted to know whether or not I could and if it would be enjoyable. It sounds like it wouldn’t be very enjoyable at all. I could still get a Kindle and stick to mobis although I would have to switch all of my ePubs to mobis–Thankfully not too hard of a job with Calibre

yes, please…

Got mine a couple days ago. Downloaded a few books last night and found you can’t jump from the table of contents to a particular chapter nor is there an easy way to navigate around a book. What a pile of shit. I am really really disappointed with this especially after using the iPad over Christmas.

It’s great the Kindle has e-ink, is lightweight, the battery lasts forever and I can increase the font to a nice size (though that makes for ugly indenting in places) but not being able to jump around a text fast is a major turnoff for me. That stupid number location thing they have is ridiculous. I had thought there was a ruler thing at the bottom that you could use a cursor to slide across. Humbug. :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown:

[quote=“Mucha Man”]Got mine a couple days ago. Downloaded a few books last night and found you can’t jump from the table of contents to a particular chapter nor is there an easy way to navigate around a book. What a pile of shit. I am really really disappointed with this especially after using the iPad over Christmas.

It’s great the Kindle has e-ink, is lightweight, the battery lasts forever and I can increase the font to a nice size (though that makes for ugly indenting in places) but not being able to jump around a text fast is a major turnoff for me. That stupid number location thing they have is ridiculous. I had thought there was a ruler thing at the bottom that you could use a cursor to slide across. Humbug. :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown:[/quote]

That problem is the fault of the publisher, not the Kindle. Some publishers don’t bother to make their table of contents with links instead of just the list of chapters. A few don’t bother to tag the table of contents so that you can jump there with the “go to” menu option and I’ve even seen a few not bother to put in a table of contents at all. Most books I buy do have a properly linked TOC though, so maybe you just got a bad sample. Better publishers also include navigation marks. With nav marks there are small dots in the progress bar at the bottom of the page showing where each chapter/section/etc is and you can use the 5-way pointer to navigate between them quickly (left to go back one chapter, right to go forward). However it seems well less than half of Kindle titles have nav marks.

I understand what you’re saying, but I seldom jump around in a novel. I read it cover to cover. The reference books I have all have links, as do some of the non-fiction.

I love my Kindle. Love it.

Thanks jlick. Good to hear they aren’t all like this. Al I need are chapter markers. I suppose I can just go through a book and make them myself.

Craig, I downloaded (among others) the King James Bible and also the complete works of Shakespeare. Not much good either without clear chapter/play breaks. :laughing:

Ouch

At least the Kindle user guide has links in the table of contents… :unamused:

[quote=“Mucha Man”]Al I need are chapter markers. I suppose I can just go through a book and make them myself.

Craig, I downloaded (among others) the King James Bible and also the complete works of Shakespeare. Not much good either without clear chapter/play breaks. :laughing:[/quote]
Great thing about the Kindle: you can pick up tons of out-of-copyright material for free or near-free.

The problem however is that the editions are often crap. If it’s translated, you’re probably dealing with translations made a century ago. As you’ve already discovered, the chapter markers don’t work well. Also, the Amazon store doesn’t handle these well: right now I’m looking for a specific translation (of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, ugh), and when I go to that specific edition in Amazon, it also suggests a Kindle edition of Spinoza, but it’s not the same one.

For what it’s worth: I’m moderately happy with MobileReference’s King James Bible (links for books and chapters within the books), and the “Shakespeare Ultimate Collection”, editor Darryl Marks (links for plays, but not unfortunately for acts and scenes within the plays). I had to pay for both of them: I can’t remember how much, but they’re a lot better than the free things I downloaded first.

I did look at a couple of editions that have linked glossaries, which sound awfully clever, but they’re too awkward to use on a Kindle.

I do find myself occasionally messed up with the Kindle when I lose my place (for example, if I search back to find out who a character is, or if I accidentally press that arrow button rather than the page turn) - finding it again seems oddly difficult.

[quote=“Mucha Man”]Thanks jlick. Good to hear they aren’t all like this. Al I need are chapter markers. I suppose I can just go through a book and make them myself.

Craig, I downloaded (among others) the King James Bible and also the complete works of Shakespeare. Not much good either without clear chapter/play breaks. :laughing:[/quote]

That’s probably because they are project gutenberg/free e-books, nobody has bothered to prepare them properly for Kindle.