My Kindle Paperwhite

I own both a Kobo Mini and a Kindle Paperwhite. Here's a brief description of the Paperwhite. I call her Melinda.

Contents

• The Device
• Price
• Selection   
• Battery Life
• Wi-fi
• Apps
• Page Count
• Text
• Menu
• Archiving/Downloading
• Interactivity
• Subscriptions

The Device

The Kindle Paperwhite is a device made by Amazon.  It has a 6" screen which is good for reading but which is a little hard on my hands; after reading for a few hours last night, I had some tingling and nerve pain from how I'd been holding it.

The screen lights up with varying degrees of brightness which is easy to change.  The screen is clearly visible both in darkness and bright sunlight.

The Paperwhite comes in black, and you can buy decals from decal girl or a variety of cases from Amazon to decorate it.

I've just checked, and the device will fit into a jacket pocket. Theoretically, it fit into my jeans pocket too, it just wasn't terribly secure.

The touch screen is very responsive.

Price

The Kindle Paperwhite currently sells at £109. With built-in 3G access it's £169, but I believe you'll have that 3G access for life.

Selection

The Kindle Store has a huge selection, many of which are available for free.  However, you cannot read non-Kindle books on the device.

Kindle books can often be heavily reduced, so if you keep an eye on a site like Kind of Book it's possible to get great bargains. 

Battery Life

I read for 2-3 or more hours a day, and I doubt that the Paperwhite would stay charged for more than two weeks at that rate.  The USB charger is exactly the same as the Kobo charger, which is handy if, like me, you have both.

Wi-Fi

You can sign into Wi-Fi hotspots, pay £60 more for 3G access, or simply edit your library from the desktop application.


Apps

Both the desktop and iOs app work extremely well.


Page Count

The Paperwhite has a time-to-read feature which tells you how long you have left in your current chapter and in the book as a whole based on your reading speed.  Some books feature "real page numbers" which tells you which page you'd be on if you were reading a physical copy.  All Kindle books use 'locations' which really just annoy me.  I really don't find it encouraging to know that I'm looking at location 2247 out of 7768, and nor do I find it helpful when my bookmarks give their location like that.

Text

You can choose from a variety of fonts, font sizes, margins, and justifications.  They're illustrated with little pictures, rather than on a sliding scale, so you can see what it'll look like before changing it.

Menu

I hate the Kindle Paperwhite's menu screen.

In cover view, your menu screen will first show you three books in your library - in order of recently read, author, title, or collection - along with a 'we suggest' section at the bottom, showing four books they want you to buy.  You can also clearly see the little shopping cart icon, and what bugs me about both of these is the sense of being sold to all the time.  Sure, if I go to the amazon website I expect them to try to sell me things.  I don't want them to keep nudging at me every time I want to read a book.

In list view, you can, again, see your books in order of recently read, title, author, or collections.  Collections are like folders that you can put books into, only books can be in more than one at a time.  I  currently have Cookbooks, Light Fiction, Dark Fiction, Detective, Non-Fiction, Sci-fi/Fantasy, Short Stories, and Stephen King.

Archiving/Downloading

Like the Kobo you can either view books on your device or all books in your collection.  It takes less than a minute to download a book.

Interactivity

I haven't noticed any.  Oh, wait, they once did this thing where if you linked your Amazon and Facebook accounts you could win a prize.

Subscriptions

There are a number of subscriptions available for e-ink devices.  I haven't currently tested any, but I did just get a free subscription to a magazine, so I'll let you know how it works.  There are a few free magazine subscriptions available, but no free newspaper subscriptions so far.