Posted on 11/27/2011 6:21:00 AM PST by Eye of Unk
Has anyone bought the Kindle Fire yet? Is it an adequate tablet and book reader? With my town having lost its brick and mortar book store all I have is miniscule supermarket best sellers. I do not want to invest in an Ipad, I do like the Kindle foe e-book reading but the Fire at its low price is very tempting, I would like to hear of any reviews, the ones I see on Amazon I have to kinda take for a lot of favoritism.
Dead tree books are my favorite too but I have a 27’ fifth wheel travel trailer FULL of books, every single Clive Cussler, all the Travis McGees, John Ringo you name it going back 20 years, hardcovers and mostly sci-fi.
I would say I have over 2000 books, all good enough to sell, but they are my past, lots of popular authors, really good stuff.
But I move around a lot and finding the latest Randy Wayne White is terrible (similar to the Travis McGee)because for some reasons the stores won’t sell his books. Some dispute.
I just finished John Ringo’s Citadel, and then I read the one before it, Live Free or Die, THEN I read Citadel again for the story continuation.
I have been scanning books to pdf. files.
Not OCR...just image pdf’s. They are large files but with
huge HDs and cheap 32gb micro SD cards I can have a lot of books with me on a tablet.
I also enjoy movies on my 7” tablet. Holding it in my hands the image is much larger than the 42” TV across the room.
What’s not to like :-)
I got my new Kindle Fire last week and I like it so much I’m getting my son one for Christmas. All the praise
you have read on here is accurate. I watched an episode of ‘Planet Earth’ last night and was amazed at the sharp picture.
I bought the original Kindle when it first came out. The ebooks then were never more than 9.99 and I got a lot of really good books that I have gone back and re-read many times.
My son and I have always shared books and when I found out that you can have as many as 6 devices on your account and share the content, I got him a Kindle.
My husband likes audio books and we have an account with Audiobooks.com and one of the first things I did was check out our audio library and it is compatable with the Fire.
So I can read books and magazines, or listen to a book while I am knitting.
You can surf the web with it and you can set up an outside email account such as yahoo, hot mail or your own private one if you choose.
But don’t expect an ipad, its a media device and a very good one. You can also get some ebooks on Amazon from free to .99,1.99,2.99. Some libraries also lend ebooks.
I have installed an RV roof mounted solar panel to 4 golf cart batteries, they sell very compact solar panels that should in theory recharge a tablet, or charge a battery that will hold the charge to then recharge a tablet.
I doubt that will be an issue for a device that draws very few watts, now something bigger like a full sized PC and monitor or even a small LCD TV is different. Just depends if a person has some basic deep cycle battery equipment in an RV, boat or camper. Or even just a modern power tool.
But a topic like this doesn’t belong here. I’m just curious to what point this Kindle Fire can be utilized, could a person access FR and post comments?
I bought B&N’s colored Nook for my grandson a few days before they came out with their version of an Ipad which was even cheaper. I’ll admit as a meddling grandmother, it was an attempt to help this three year-old learn English as his mother, a psychologist, is Portugese and although fluent in seven languages, including English, evidently speaks only Portugese to him. She’s with him all day; they live in NZ, and my son’s busy teaching psychology. When he gets home, she wants only Portugese spoken. She’s determined to return to Portugal permanently. They were in that dreadful earthquake and lost their house and all their possessions, but it seems a bit much to want to flee to Portugal of all places.
Well, they’ve flown to Portugal for three months (before they have to go back to NZ), and son emailed me how grateful he was that I’d gotten the Nook for little Daniel. Why in the world — with Portugal in such trouble, would you want your child basically trapped there, unable to speak English which is today’s lingua Franca? This is nuts. Something unfortunate is going. At some point I suspect the only contact my son will have with Daniel will be over the internet, so I guess the Nook was indeed a great idea.
Now that I find very interesting, often on long flights I just get tired of keeping my eyes open hour after hour either reading or watching a movie, but hearing an audio book is different. I will have to head back to Amazon and see just how that works, so far I’m sold, for reasons some might understand I don’t want to be an Apple fan, I do not want to spend $500 or more on a tablet just yet, I won’t even be going back to work unless for some reason somebody WANTS me to work and my seasonal job won’t appear until next april unless I fly down to Australia and work their summer but for other reasons this year I am stuck in Alaska this winter.
Yes the earthquakes were terrible, it was immediately after that I decided to make work arraignments to fly from Alaska to Oz being that I am in the concrete batching field.
Sounds to me the child would benefit from English speaking tutorials or even just childrens audio books.
The Kindle Firs is nothing more than a direct POS device linking to the Amazon ecosystem of services. It’s meant as a device that locks you in to books and movies and whatever else can be bought through Amazon.
Why would anybody want to limit themselves to just one vendor? The fact is that, the Fire should not have to cost anybody anything, and it should be free if it’s mostly a POS device in every home.
Uh huh, I had that thought for a bit.
If Amazon crashes then the Fire is useless.
If Amazon wants they can track your habits.
If the Feds want they can track you through Amazon...
But otherwise what else? I know some people disagree with Amazon, I could but ever since they started they have never really disappointed me, shipping is fast even by Alaska standards, they are much better than Ebay as far as security I think.
And somebody probably from Samsung will have a clone in the next month even cheaper. I skipped on the Kindle because I simply waited to see it mature a bit, it did and it has improved and is cheaper still. I agree Amazon should indeed offer this device with a contract just like a cellphone, of which I prefer to use a Tracfone.
I don’t like contracts and because Amazon did stand up against some internet taxation I am beginning to have some limited faith in them.
If you don’t want the whole media thing, just a reader and an audio book, the other Kindles also can be used as audiobooks. With the other Kindles you have to download the audiobooks to a computer and then to your kindle.
I haven’t tried to buy and download an audio from my Fire yet but since I just had to download the audiobook ap and sign in to access the library, I assume you can do that.
I hope you find what you want. I don’t think you will be disappointed whichever one you choose. All of the Kindles stay charged a lot longer than the Fire. I have had to charge it frequently.
Thank you all for a very fast courteous and intellectual response, I bet liberals don’t even bother with the Kindle Fire, probably too basic, too commoner, non-elitist and so on.
I gotta warm up the truck, its -18F and i have to drive 13 miles into town and pick up a few things, like a couple of books, that will be about $15 in gas for my 8.1 liter Silverado gasser round trip.
Books from library for iPad and kindle are free, great. Sometimes you have to wait for them but beats paying 14.99. And there are very easy ways to pass them around but won’t go into that.
I have run out of room for dead treenbooks, seriously and like to read two or three at a time so carrying them around is impossible. The only downside is waiting during takeoff on a plane and not being able to read. And not seeing the details of maps, etc.
I don’t disagree with Amazon’s services, but I do disagree with a lock-in system where any purchases one makes, has to be through their POS Kindle Fire.
If Samsung does come out with a similar item, I’m pretty sure that it won’t be to lock people into their shopping ecosystem, and it will be a general purpose tablet for anything that can be done in the “open” and not in a closed system like the Fire/Amazon.
>>could a person access FR and post comments?<<
I know I can on my Nook Color. ;)
Me too. I buy mostly used books on Amazon, or trade the paperbacks I have for others on a site I discovered earlier this year. It's PaperbackSwap.com for anyone who is interested.
You post your books on the site, then earn a credit for every book someone orders from you. You then use those credits to order books that you want from other people who have posted their books on the site. When mailing a book out to someone, you have the option of buying the postage and optional tracking from the site, or you can purchase the postage when you take the package to the post office. If you use their postage and tracking, once you've marked the book shipped, you get instant credit. The main thing to remember is that you pay for the shipping when you mail the books out, but get the books you order sent to you for free. They are also linked to Amazon.
I am on sending this reply through my Kindle Fire. I love this kindle..easy to use, lots of ways to use it.
I am on sending this reply through my Kindle Fire. I love this kindle..easy to use, lots of ways to use it.
Sorry for the double posts. FR is so burpby today! Keep getting 503 errors everytime I refresh or click on a link.
You might consider a cheap Android tablet, or an Android phone for that matter. There are eReader apps for all the major ebook formats (Kindle, etc.). Not only can you use it as an ereader, you can surf the web via WiFi.
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