Today I had more time to spend with the Kindle 2 that Amazon kindly loaned to me. So there I was, sitting on the MTR, pulled it out of my backpack, flipped the switch and was instantly at the page where I’d left off. (Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur.) That’s super convenient.

One of the nice features of the Kindle 2 is that you can receive a free sample of the book you’re interested in – generally seems to be from the title page up through the first chapter. I’d done that with the Klosterman book, received the sample.

I sat there reading through the introduction, really dug it – thought it was his best, most mature and thoughtful writing to date. And so, there I am on the MTR, in the tunnel, going to the menu and clicking on “buy this book.” And the full book was downloaded onto my Kindle before the train pulled into the next station. That’s the good bit.

The negative bit, a minor annoyance but still worth noting, was that the entire book came down as a separate file from the free sample. So I had to go back to the home page, click on the new file, and then find my own way to the part where I’d left off in the sample file. Let’s hope in some future version of the software that they find a way to merge your purchase with the sample you’d previously received, so that you can keep your place.

Now that I’d successfully done that, I decided to wirelessly browse the store while still on the train. One of the books they recommended for me was Super Freakonomics. I haven’t read Freakonomics, so I decided to simply go for the sample free chapter. I got it in seconds.

But that led to my next negative surprise. I was charged $1.99 for the wireless download of the free sample. So for us international users, it turns out the free samples are not really free. Of course these charges can really add up quickly. So I think I’ll be turning off the wireless service and relying on downloads direct to my computer in the future. It’s really a shame that we have to pay a significant premium for what people in the US get for free.

UPDATE: My bad. I wasn’t charged $2 for sample downloads. Amazon has this current deal where if you buy Eating the Dinosaur, you get Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live for free. I never specifically ordered this book but it was delivered to me and I was charged the $1.99 download fee. I was not charged download fees for free samples. But I am not happy about being charged a $1.99 download fee for a book I didn’t order!

Overall, I’ve found reading books on the Kindle 2 to be a tremendously comfortable experience – both in terms of holding the device and the actual reading itself. There are six font sizes and, for the sake of this review, let’s call 1 the smallest, 6 the largest, and I’ve found that setting it at 4 works for me.

I find that the gray background, instead of the white you get on the printed page, to be comfortable – I think scientifically it probably goes back to the less bright light reflected back to your eyes, the more comfortable it is. At least that’s my guess.

At any rate, I find myself metaphorically tearing through the pages, reading at a very fast rate. When the train came to my stop, I didn’t have to fumble for a book mark or turn a corner down. I simply shut off the Kindle, knowing that it would come back on at exactly the spot where I’d left off. That’s nice.

I should note that when you’re reading a book on the Kindle, there are no page numbers, there are “locations,” which seem to correspond to paragraphs. So one “page” will have multiple locations. And naturally, since the fonts are re-sizable, the number of pages that an eBook contains will vary depending on the font size you’ve chosen. There is also a status bar on the bottom of the screen showing where you are in the book in terms of a percentage.

Most books have a table of contents and you can click on the chapter heading and be taken instantly to that chapter. Otherwise, you can specify a location to go to, the location generally being a matter of guesswork of course, and you’re taken to that. The Klosterman book has copious footnotes, and you can click on the footnote number and be taken instantly to the footnote, then click on the “back” button to return to where you were in the main text. Nice.

For kids, students and people for whom English is a second language, position the cursor next to any word and the word definition appears on the bottom of the screen, taken from the dictionary that comes with every Kindle.

One thing I miss is the ability to “flip through” a book. You can go page by page or enter various location numbers, but I found myself wishing there were more navigation options – in particular “skip 5 (or 10) pages,” “skip to next chapter,” etc.

Overall, I’m still enjoying this.

Coming up in part 3, I’ll review the iPhone Kindle app and investigate how it syncs your library and notes and more with the Kindle 2 device.