It happened again. I was reading at lunch and realized I had not charged my kindle in quite a while. It died. ARRRGH. So I am at work, no where near the standard charger. The plug on this is not run of the mill, but I have a drawer full of old cell phone chargers.

Before beginning to use the charger I will describe later I decided to attempt to do a trickle charge with my USB cable. We’ll if your Kindle is so dead that it won’t alert your machine it is connected then your machine like mine will likely not charge the USB port to even trickle charge the unit. So I began a search for alternatives. It began with confirming that a Kindle will indeed trickle charge at all.

On page 16 of the PDF users guide it says”USB port — plug in the included USB cable to transfer content between your computer and your Kindle. Your Kindle will also accept a small trickle charge over USB that may extend your battery life if your computer’s USB port or powered USB hub provides power.” The words that matter are “small” “trickle” and most importantly “may”. In my case it was too far gone to “may”…
Read more

So far I have now had my Kindle almost 60 days, that should constitute an acceptable period of time to reflect on the devices shortcomings and advantages. First let me say this piece may not be as positive as I had hoped when I planed on writing this a month ago, the new has worn off and my Kindle is now yet another tool I use.

I just returned from a vacation, thus the extended absence here, and I have to say I unfortunately only used my Kindle once during my trip. Now I did not use any other book at all, other that an atlas in conjunction with my GPS, but my iPod still got the lion share of use in the goings and comings of the trip in the plane.

In general my Kindle has been a huge disappointment in the area of replacing my standard Bible as there just is no real use of the book 2.0 hypertext technology by any of the major translations. In general reading it for the sake of reading is quite good, but using it in a class where you are hopping around a great deal you quickly get frustrated as I am quite comfortable moving between books in the Bible and the Kindle just has no translations that allow for that method o use well as of yet. I have hopes there will be sooner than later.

Another difficulty on this front is the very real, it has happened to me twice, gasp, failure of power. If your going to use it, just get used to plugging it in nightly before you go to bed and then this will never happen to you. But try and push it 3 days and you may be in for trouble if you use the wireless at all. For all the fear that this causes when your not with your charger I suspect it won’t happen to me again for quite some time as I have adapted to charging it just like my phone.

The actual experience of reading is still my biggest reason for using the kindle, I can sit and breeze through a book in record time with little awareness of the device at all. I have moved to a font setting of 3 and find it very readable and not to large as to make page turning to frequent, but not as small as 2 where I need my glasses for sure. Setting 1, forget about it.

How are you after a couple of months of use?  I am disappointed in the lack of real news from Amazon, I have seen a comment saying as a publicly trading company they can’t really say how shipping is going due to the impact it might have on their stock.   But surely others could comment, I had hoped my hometown newspaper would hop on board, but as o now the Dallas Morning news or the Fort Worth Star Telegram are both no shows.

So for now my Kindle has replaced my need for any Paper back or hard back I have thus far looked for.  I am about to test that on a Harry Turtledove book called the “Guns of the South” – NO GO…  Although there are 34 books from the author available, for some reason that one is not.  I got it from a fellow in passing and frankly I had hoped to get it on the Kindle to avoid reading the grimy stained book that I was so generously offered from the fellow.  Oh well, I still have 3 books not started that are awaiting my attention, but I wish there were some way to inquire as to if there were any conversion in the works.  Despite a smaller library size, the Kindle is still by far the easiest on my eyes reading experience I have, so I am still pleased to have one while others are still waiting.

So far I have seen little in the way of Kindle specifically created aftermarket items. The woolen cover from Octovo is joined by a leather messenger bag that clearly was not initially designed for the Kindle though looks like it might accommodate it sufficiently. When looking for other product made by the “Octovo” seller there are none listed other than the woolen kindle slip cover and the leather messenger bag.

Kudos to whoever Octovo is for seeing an emerging market and reaching it first with product. Now we’ll see if people flock to the woolen alternative or make their own.

I am in the midst of creating a homegrown cover that I think I may release. I’d like to see what I might learn about other Kindle owners’ tastes regarding personlization.  Pick your own fabric just use my pattern. In any case maybe someone will release some sales numbers so we can get a little taste for how many Kindles are out there.

If you’ve recently purchased a Kindle 2 and need a cover, you can read the Amazon Kindle 2 Leather Cover review.

• Saddle Brown Leather Executive Jacket (Kindle 1)
• Smooth Mocha Leather Executive Jacket (Kindle 1)
• Pebbled Black Leather Executive Jacket (Kindle 1)
• Belkin Neoprene Sleeve Case (Kindle 2)
• Leather Cover (Kindle 2)
• Dark Brown Cole Haan Hand-Stained Leather Cover (Kindle 2)