By: Blake

The kindle is a small light weight mass storage device that can hold up to 1,500 books and a variety of reading material such as the news papers and even blogs. All literature is available to download to the kindle with out the need to hook it up to a computer as it has its own data stream via Amazon Whispernet.

Kindle was designed to be as convenient as possible and has many features that makes it easy to use. One of the first things people notice about the Kindle is it’s size. It only weighs 10.2 ounces and is about 1/3 of an inch thin. The Kindle’s size makes it easily portable and usable just about anywhere. But how good is the battery? The battery takes about two hours to charge and will last for up to two weeks, but connecting to Whispernet will use more of the battery. As far as downloading goes, it can be done just about anywhere. Whether you are on a plane or at the beach, as long as you are in the covered areas you will be able to access the literature.

Kindle also has some features that books don’t come with. When you don’t feel like reading but you want to get through a book, you can activate text to speech. With text to speech activated Kindle will read the book, magazine, or blog to you. Kindle has features that can help with book related projects as well. If you are doing a research paper you can highlight important passages and when you want to view them again you can see all passages that you highlighted at the same time without having to flip through the pages to find where they are. Also you can make annotations just as you would in the margin of a book that you are reading. If you prefer larger or smaller text you can adjusted it so that the text is more comfortable for you to read.

It is easy to see how the Kindle could replace all of those big cumbersome books, especially school text books. Taking several classes may require the student to carry around large books, but the Kindle offers a solution to this problem. Alternatively it could be great for people who travel or just have a lot of books. If the Kindle catches on I think that it will replace all paper books and it will be the way we read our news in the future.