In Theory, there is no Practice.

Kindle:
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, Mignon Fogarty. Non-fiction, and I really like it. Listening to her podcasts as well.

Reading:
Magic Bites, Ilona Andrews. About 70 pages in. I like it so far, but we are still in the defining the players in the mystery stage. It started off nicely, and I like the post apocalyptic Atlanta.

Audio:
Dunno, just finished Mirror Dance earlier this morning over breakfast, haven’t decided what to start / finish next.

I got a new toy August 28, 2008:
An Amazon Kindle. On a physical use level, I like it, with a few reservations. The screen is nice. I find the font and contrast very easy to read. I don’t have any problems with the page flicker when changing the page. I do wish it were more responsive to the controls. My biggest annoyance is two-fold. The first and lessor: the power / wireless switches are on the back, which is covered when in the provided case. It would have been nice if these controls were located by the adapter / headphone / volume controls on the bottom edge. Then all the controls would be easy to get to. This is compounded by the bigger problem of having nearly all of both long edges being buttons. I find it very difficult to adjust the controls on the back, or even at time just moving without bumping pre / next page. Other than those two usability problems, I find thekindle is extremely easy to use, though I did need a bit of training to figure out the controls. Second nature now.

Now, on to content. I have read a few different things.

I tried some of the free blog trials. ESPN – Bill Simmons (aka, The Sports Guy) worked well, except that his is on sabbatical and it doesn’t really make sense to pay $0.99 for no new content. When he gets done recovering from the Super Bowl (or whatever lame excuse he gave ESPN for needing time off), I will probably subscribe to it.

Some of the others, less so. O’Reilly’s MAKE Blog was less useful. The problem is that MAKE Blog is very, very graphics and video intensive, and the Kindle just is not good at that. Ars Technica’s was better for the Kindle, but I find I am much more interested in the forum’s than about 80% of the Ars front page. I do skim it, and read a few article, but I can do that for free much easier.

I have also gotten a few books. I have only completed one complete one, Storm Born by Richelle Mead, but I have read non-trivial parts of others, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty and The KJV Holy Bible. The navigation for the Bible is a bit of a chore, but it is a very long book, and most books are intended to be referenced by verse / sentence / sentence fragment as we traditionally do the bible, so that is an outlier in normal book usage. The Kindle is really good at it though, but the lack of responsiveness I mentioned earlier is most felt in navigating the Bible.

I did load and Audio book from Audlbe.com, but I didn’t listen to it on the Kindle (I used my iPod). I would be a lot more excited about this if I could use the Kindle at work, but the wireless access gets the Kindle black listed.