I’ve now had a Kindle 2 for two weeks – actually 2 Kindle 2′s, first the review loaner I got from Amazon and then the one that I purchased for myself.

Pluses:

I love being able to carry so many books with me in such a slim and light weight device. That’s always been one of my biggest issues when traveling – balancing wanting to bring a few books against trying to minimize weight in my backpack.

Reading books, navigating on the device and populating the device are features that are mostly intuitive and can be quickly learned by everyone.

I find that for sequential reading – by which I mean simply reading a book from page 1 to the end – the device is intuitive and easy to use. The fact that I can hold and manipulate it with one hand, or even put it down on a table without fear of losing my place, is great. That I can sit down on a bus or train and instantly be at where I left off – or stand on a bus or train and have no problem holding this and turning pages with one hand, that’s also incredibly useful.

The almost instant delivery – via wireless or download to my PC – versus having to spend time shopping (usually unsuccessfully in HK) or waiting two weeks for delivery from the US remains a major plus. And I absolutely love being able to get the first chapter of every book for free. Not to mention the fact that in most cases, the eBook version is much cheaper than the physical book.

As I’ve said before, I believe that having the screen be gray instead of white means noticeably less eye strain when reading for long periods. The ability to select from six different font sizes for every book is also amazingly useful in this regard.

The Kindle app for my iPhone works really well. And they’ve just released beta Kindle software for the PC along with a promise that Mac software will be released soon.

Last but not least – when buying an eBook reader, one of the most critical factors is how you’re going to fill it up. And at the moment, Amazon offers a far wider selection than either Sony or Barnes & Nobles. And aside from the wider choice of titles, they’re running constant specials – some special free books and some bundled offers (for example, one of Chuck Klosterman’s older books included free when buying his latest one). The second screen on the Nook may be nice, it may be useful, but it’s meaningless if the book you want isn’t available for that device.

Minuses:

I’m disappointed that the Kindle 2 does not contain native support for PDF files – something that the Kindle DX reportedly does have. I do not want to send PDFs to Amazon for conversion out of privacy concerns – many of the PDFs I want to view are confidential corporate documents and I don’t want to inadvertently be the source of a leak. And I’ve found that converting PDFs on my own, via the freeware MobiPocket creator, is a less than perfect process – sometimes small sections of the files don’t convert properly.

Navigation for non-sequential reading is clunky. For example, technical manuals or travel books or cook books. It’s better for books purchased from Amazon – use the menu to go to the table of contents and then highlight a chapter, push a button and you’re taken there. Converted PDF files feature no such indexing. And for at least one of the books I purchased, the index at the back of the book was not indexed – there was no way to go through that index, highlight an entry and go directly there. The QWERTY keyboard is also really only fit for single-finger entry. I also found myself wishing that there were more options such as “go forward ten pages” (it is possible to do a “skip to the next/previous chapter” which is good but I’d like more.

While images contained in the books come out okay, I was frustrated because they usually seemed to load at a nice contrasty resolution and then, once loaded, “soften” up quite a bit. I looked for a way to manually increase contrast but didn’t find it. And while you can select an image and click on “zoom” to have the image increase to full screen, I would like an option to be able to further zoom an image – this lack was especially noticed in books that contained tables of data treated as images; it was difficult to read some of the figures in the tables and I couldn’t zoom in any further.

If you are going to buy a Kindle, I recommend that you purchase a protective cover and a small light for it.

I bought Amazon’s own $30 cover for the Kindle. There are all sorts of third party covers available but the Amazon one seems good enough.

I purchased the Mighty Bright clip-on LED light with flexible neck, $20 if memory serves. It has 2 LEDs and you can have either one or both lit; it runs on 3 AAA batteries that are not included in the package. The light is more than sufficient to illuminate an entire page in dark surroundings. However, glare from the light was sometimes an issue and I’ve had to really twist it around to minimize that.

The built-in dictionary feature may be useful for some, especially those for whom English is a second (or third!) language. The ability to create bookmarks and jot down notes tied to specific places in the text may also be useful for some people. And I found the text-to-speech feature worked far better than I expected it to (and I liked that one could choose either a male or female voice).

Note that Amazon seems to have now stopped selling the US-only CDMA edition of the Kindle 2. The only version you can buy is the international GSM version. This change took place after I purchased mine (a refurbished version of the CDMA model at a $40 savings).

I purchased this version using a US credit card and US billing address. This gives me a $2 savings on all eBooks I purchase and access to the full Kindle book store (the international version of the book store has about 15 or 20% less books available) but means I can only download the books to my PC and then transfer via USB from the PC to the Kindle. I can live with this although using the wireless feature in the US was really convenient! (And yes, on Tuesday I went to Barnes & Nobles in NYC, sat on the floor in front of a section I was interested in, and then pulled out the Kindle to see which of the books in front of me were available for Kindle. Maybe I downloaded one or two of them while sitting there.)

Overall, I’m extremely happy with my Kindle 2. It’s not perfect, but for me it’s extremely useful and works as promised. It goes with me everywhere – from long trips to short commutes, from the dining room table to the bedroom to, um, the bathroom. In recent years, I haven’t been reading as much as I used to and I think that having this is going to result in reading a lot more – and no one can say that’s not a good thing.

So while I think there’s a lot of room for future enhancements to both the hardware and software, I have no regrets about sticking a stake in the ground and buying one now.

Is a Kindle right for you? That’s something only you can decide. But I do think that everyone who reads should at least take a closer look at this.

(Note that the Kindle DX, essentially the same machine with a much larger screen at almost double the price, will start being available internationally starting early next year.)