whichever device you use

Books You may have read on whichever device you use that Amazon have released a software version of the Kindle electronic book for the PC. It's a smart move. As well as possibly being a useful back-up for current users, it gives waverers and those of us who are just curious a chance to try the service. A couple of the blogs I read have suggested that there's a regional restriction, but I've had no problem downloading and running the software in the UK. but those restrictions may come into force if you actually try to pay for a book.

With respect to Amazon in this different environment simply feels like a very basic version of Adobe Reader or the Microsoft Word reader. Except in both of those your experience though different from a book, replicates all of the carefully chosen typefaces and text sizes. By (in some cases) standardising those and leaving them open for user change, you're removing a couple of the elements of the product and part of the overall experience designed by the author or more likely the publisher.

The more interesting adventure is the Kindle store, where it's possible to download samples of the books on offer. As with the rest of Amazon, it's possible to look at the whole selection in one list and sort the items by how low and high the prices are. At present the lowest priced book is The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy at $2.30 in what looks like a version copy/pasted from the Gutternberg Project.

The highest is Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4) by Materials Science International Team (MSIT) costing a staggering $7,213.28 (which rather a lot of money for a bunch of data). Always interested in nuclear materials (and stuff) I of course downloaded the sample. The book is 503 pages long. The sample I was sent is 286 locations.

I don't know what the Kindle conversion rate is on that, but this looks like a fair amount of the book. Probably about five hundred dollars worth. That was enough for the preface in which I've discovered:

"This volume provides basic information to a field that is facing a strong revival in a growing number of countries. The volume can not claim to be comprehensive covering all systems ..."

Wait, what? If you've spent over $7000 on this volume that's not what you'd like to hear. I know that science changes and develops but the vagueness and inexactitude of that makes me shiver. I didn't understand much of the rest of it, so I went to the product reviews seeking understanding and found this. Ha!