Be Excellent To Each Other

New Kindle has "free 3g" no contract no fee. How does that work? Surely there is a network required? If so, who is it with?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002LVUWFE/

Don't care. It's free anywhere in the world, and it just works(tm).

[edit]Old Kindle had it too, you see. New Kindle is the first one not to come with 3G but with wireless instead as an option. At just over £100 it seems a bargain, too. I do wonder about buying eBooks in £ rather than $, though.

Can you have the same account on two Kindles? So my wife and I could both read the same books on our own devices?

Crikey, £109 for the new Kindle. I'm really REALLY tempted to get one of these now! Is there anything else good/better for that money?

That is an annoyingly tempting price.

Isn't it. Though I think they've bungled a little bit with the release date being the end of the summer as it's not available until the end of August

So wait, the 3G version gives you basic web browsing from anywhere in world there is a mobile internet signal for the one off price £149.

I'm finding it hard to believe that the "experimental" webkit web browser will last.

I'm not a massive reader, I don't get though many books in a year. I'll never have the need to carry more than one book around with me. But I want one. It really is at that "Oooo" price.

I was all set to buy an iPad dammit.

Yup.

Amazon are really generous with their sharing, to be honest - you can have the same account on PC, Mac, Kindle, iPhone, Android...

The (modest) downsides to account sharing are that you need to share the Amazon account (including payment card) and if you both read the same book at the same time you'll need to turn off the sync-to-last-read-page-across-devices future.

The experimental web browser isn't all that usable, and is over a year old so unlikely to be removed. It's very clunky because of how slow eInk screens are to update. They added Twitter in the last update too (when you highlight a block of text, you can one-click share the quote on Twitter). And yes, the 3G is world wide and almost fee free. You do pay extra to buy a book outside your home country - e.g. US users pay $2 if they buy a book on-device in the UK. You can, however, buy the book on PC and transfer over USB to avoid that, or (I imagine) this new Wifi addition.

It's a very, very nice thing. I've not travelled with mine to the US, preferring to only carry the more versatile iPad, but the Kindle is still the device I reach for at home when I want to read. Also, I haven't bought a single physical book since I got it in January.

I don't know - I was without a phone today and posted here with it to get someone to text my mate and tell him I was on my way

I do wonder how much of the current e-reader sales are driven purely by gadget lust. I mean I quite fancy one and I must only read about five or six books a year. I can honestly say that the physical nature of books has never presented me with the slightest hindrance in any way.

Are there many normal people using these things yet?

Well, there is me and Dr G...

So no.

I....no.

Well, I have... er, no.

Exactly.

I'd MUCH rather have £150+ quidsworth of real books myself.

I can see why TIFDRG would want one as he's always traveling to Yankland.

Seriously though I can see normals buying them now the price is sensible. They were what, 250 odd when this thread started, now 100? That's birthday prezzie range.

I buy about two second hand, 1p+ & £2.75 postage books a month from Amazon, which I then give away to friends/the library once I've finished with them. I'll keep non-fiction books for reference but rarely keep fiction as I'm unlikely to read them again, and if I do I can get them from the library. Buying a Kindle then yarring the books instead would cost about the same per year. Also, books take up TONS of space, which I don't really have.

The main reason I would like an ebook reader is for reading PDFs, i.e. manuals, journals, academic thesis/dissertations etc as I really struggle to read things like this on a computer screen.

FTFM

Woah, are you claiming to be a 'normal', Zardazzler?

EURGH, NORMO!

Of course. You're all freakish parodies of humanity.

The Kindle store has now launched in the UK, meaning that blog and magazine subscriptions are now available.

GOD DAMN IT, I really want a Kindle now!

Looking at the magazine/newspaper subscriptions, I can't see how long the subscription is for. For e.g. £13.99 to subscribe to the Independent. Is that a month, a year...?

There's some good books on there for free too!

Uhhh...



That looks pretty clear to me

Oh FFS, it's a Friday afternoon, I clearly need to go home and sleep...