Amazon’s Kindle for PC has arrived and Amazon says that a Mac version is coming soon. The Kindle was originally an electronic book reader about the same size as a large novel. It has a crisp easy to read grayscale display and can download books from Amazon’s Kindle store. However the Kindle concept has expanded to include 3 different models of reader, an iPhone app and now the PC version. The Windows software allows you to read books from the Kindle store on your PC and, if you have one, also sync with your Kindle device.
If you live in the USA the Kindle PC application is great news. The Kindle store offers over 360,000 books, including most of the New York Times Best Sellers for just $9.99 (about 5.99). You can also get newspapers like The Washington Post or even UK papers like The Times. There are also hundreds of free Kindle books like the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and so on.
But if you live in the UK, the Kindle PC software isn’t so good. First of all not all the books are available. But worse than that, the free books are no longer free. Having installed the Kindle software, naturally the first thing you want to do is download a book and see what it is like to read it on the PC. There is a nice little “Shop in Kindle Store” button on the tool bar which opens a browser in the Kindle section on Amazon.com’s web site. But when I searched for free books I discovered that for me they cost $2.30.
I did manage to cheat the system for about 4 and a half minutes. I told Amazon that I lived in the USA and I was able to start downloading the books that are free to US users. I got seven books downloaded and then on the eighth Amazon had worked out that my IP address isn’t in the USA and told me that I was downloading stuff from another country and now I would have to pay the $2.30 if I wanted any more.
In desperation I went to Google and searched for “free kindle books”. Two sites which actually offered free Kindle books (mainly from the Gutenberg project) are http://www.freekindlebooks.org/ and http://kindle.sinshoppe.com/
Since the majority of the Project Gutenberg books are also available in other formats, like PDF, I don’t need the Kindle. Also having to pay for books which our distant cousins in the USA get for free means that I am not inclined in anyway to start using the Kindle PC software and therefore I guess I’m never going to a buy a Kindle device either.
If Amazon want me on board, they are going to have to bribe me. Give me free books, make me want to buy a Kindle device and sure after that I will start to spend money. But I am not willing to try out a concept, a new idea, to see if I like it and have to pay for it at the same time.
If you want the Kindle software you can get it here. It runs on Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, or Windows Vista or Windows 7.
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Tags: Amazon.com, Kindle, PC, UK
