Amazon Kindle review

You can subscribe to newspapers and magazines on the Kindle and they’re delivered each day over the wireless connection. It’s convenient, particularly for international publications, but the costs are high. Similarly, the cost of ebooks in the Amazon store is very high, and UK users appear to pay more than Americans – Amazon cites ‘operational differences’ for this.

Also, while paper books are tax-free, ebooks are subject to VAT at the normal rate, which adds to the cost (though this is true for all other ebook readers, not just Amazon’s). Books must be bought from the US store and paid for in dollars, which led to us being out of pocket when we requested a refund for an item bought in error – the exchange rate had changed against our favour by the time Amazon processed the refund.

Paid-for ebooks can only be read if bought from Amazon, but there’s a huge range of out-of-copyright free ebooks available online (see www.manybooks.net) in Kindle format. When the device is attached to a PC it will charge and you can copy books over easily. It can’t deal directly with PDF or Word documents, though – these have to be processed through Amazon’s online service, for which there’s a small fee each time.

Battery life was lower than from other readers, because the wireless connection requires power. Our Kindle varied, lasting three days under heavy use or over a week under lighter use.

It was very easy to use, though, with uncomplicated screens and menus, and simple buttons. One annoyance was that both buttons on either side of the screen are for turning to the next page, where logically the left-hand one would go back a page. This continued to confuse even after we’d got used to it.

Under the ‘experimental features’ menu there is an MP3 music player – you can load music files over the USB connection and play them through the so-so built-in speakers or the headphone socket. More usefully, there’s a text-to-speech function so the Kindle can read your ebooks to you. The computer-generated voice was quite stilted but it worked fairly well (though it struggled with unfamiliar words, technical terms and names).

Despite its problems and the hassle of buying it and its books from America, the Kindle is a great ebook reader. It’s great to look at, is easy to use and works smoothly.

MORE: click here to see our video review of the Amazon Kindle