Kindle for WP7

I never bought into the whole Kindle craze, as I felt that a dedicated device to reading books would never work, and I’m also not crazy about flipping virtual pages in an e-book.  I also can’t remember the last time I read a book from cover-to-cover (6 months ago?)—there’s just too much other stuff competing for my attention these days.  I do still head to the library at least once a month, mainly to catch up on magazines and the like.  I also put books on hold and check books out, but I’ve been short on time and motivation to actually bite into them.  (I have 6 books checked-out at the moment, and only partially dug into one—that’s been renewed twice already.)

Nevertheless, I did install the Kindle app on my iPhone last April (2010), and downloaded two free eBooks: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Living Organized: Proven Steps for a Clutter-Free and Beautiful Home.  But after reading a couple chapters of the latter, I found that I wasn’t too keen on reading on the 3.5” 320x480 screen, so I left it at that.  (One thing I did really like about it though—it remembers where you were!  No more bookmarks!  Imagine that—an entire industry getting replaced by software.)

Anyhow, I’ve been playing with my new Windows Phone 7 a lot over the past two months, and they announced the new Windows Phone 7 Kindle app last week, I thought I’d give it another shot—this time one my 4” 480x800 super AMOLED Samsung Focus.

It’s actually not half-bad.  It took me a bit to get used to the WP7 Kindle app’s UX gestures—apparently you can tap the side of the screen to flip the page instead of having to swipe (nice!), and you can bookmark/flag a page by “folding down” the corner of the page.

I also discovered Amazon’s Top 100 Kindle eBooks (and apps), which has their top 100 free books too.  In short order, I found I had downloaded 30+ books from the list.  Naturally, there were many “classics” that I’ll probably never read in my lifetime, just because they’re so dense.  Looking at the “collection” at http://kindle.amazon.com afterwards, I can start to see the virtual analogue to having a bookcase full of books to stare at.  It’s nice.  I can see why some have tried to digitize their book collections.

The book I dug into this morning was rated #11 on the top 100 free list: En Route: A Paramedic’s Stories of Life, Death, and Everything In Between.  I don’t know if the current app lets you do this, but on the website you could leave notes for yourself (or others).  There’s some pretty neat potential there.

I’m about 1/10th of the way through this book.  Who knows if I’ll finish, but I think I’ll definitely try to steal more time away from playing useless games on my phone now and more time reading books(as opposed to random, poorly written, news articles).

[And in case you were wondering: yes, I’m still too cheap to go buy books—forget digital e-books!  I imagine someone (Amazon?) must come up with a concept analogous to a library soon.  If not that, then maybe something like Netflix, were you can subscribe for time-limited book collection reading.]