First impressions of the Kindle 3, UPS delivery to Ukraine

I read the reviews, couldn't resist, and bought myself an Amazon Kindle Latest Generation Wi-Fi e-reader, the one without 3G. The price together with shipping came to about $160, or almost 1280 UAH. With a price and specs like that it was hard to hold back, all the more so since I'll be able to read e-books bought on Amazon without any hassle. I know that new e-books already cost more than paper ones, but factoring in shipping it works out cheaper, and the old ones come out something like half the price. The only catch is you have to buy through an American proxy to the right address, so it's cheaper and so you don't pay an extra $2. After all, I have the model without 3G, so I'm within my rights, and I hope they won't fight this too hard.

I placed the order on Tuesday, and they only processed and shipped it on Thursday. The package spent the weekend in Germany, and by Monday it was already in Kyiv. I got lucky with customs — they didn't hold it up, though they could have demanded a bank statement, which costs 50 UAH, but that's for residents of Kyiv; everyone else still has to travel to the capital if it gets held up there, or pay the UPS delivery service to sort the matter out, and they can charge up to $100 for that.

Around midday Monday the package set off further on its way, judging by the scan code. On Tuesday I couldn't resist and called the delivery service; they told me it would be there in a day or two and that they wouldn't be able to deliver it to my work or home, since they deliver to the city center, so I'd have to go to them almost at the river port and pick the package up myself.

And the next day in the morning they called and notified me that the package had arrived, asked whether I would be home. I said I'd be at work all day and gave them the address. In the end, around midday the courier delivered it to my work.

At the end of the post I'm putting up all the stages of the package's movement with scan codes and times, in case anyone is interested in the exact delivery time and approximate meanings of the UPS code statuses, the meanings of which I wasn't the only one looking up on the internet. Nobody called me about any of these statuses, and nothing was required of me.

Now about the Kindle itself. I'd never dealt with e-readers before, so there's nothing to compare it with, except maybe laptops and the Nokia N810 internet tablet, but reading on those never quite worked out because of too many distractions in the form of games and proper internet browsers. A good reader for ordinary books was the Nokia E61, which I lost, but a smartphone screen is still a bit small for comfortable reading.

Enough has already been said about the contrast and reading ordinary books on the third-generation Kindle, it's all wonderful. But I couldn't find anything specific about reading PDF, so I set about experimenting with the electronic versions of books I'd already bought in paper form.

I first took on the programming book I'm currently reading, PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice, Third Edition from Apress, a quality electronic version of which you can buy from the publisher or download from torrents. The original PDF is impossible to read on a six-inch reader. The book converted well through the magic e-mail, but the formatting of the program code got lost, the listings came out as a single line, meaning they became unreadable. Trimming the margins in the PDF helped, you can read it in landscape orientation, but the text is still very small; if the Kindle didn't add double margins on the left and right when reading a PDF in landscape orientation, it would have been more bearable, the result is in the screenshot. Out of curiosity I downloaded a sample of the book in the AZW format from Amazon itself, and as it turned out, in that version the program code is done as low-quality images, blowing them up to fill the whole screen doesn't even improve readability. I was disappointed by the quality, they could have somehow made the listings as text and formatted them, I've read books where with other publishers things aren't so bad. But the Kindle version of this Apress book I wouldn't read or buy even on a Kindle DX. Better the paper version, or the PDF on a tablet or Kindle DX, but both of those cost quite a lot and won't get through customs.

Next I took on Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God, which I had scanned and made into a DjVu myself. Having exported the book to PDF, I got a file almost 80 MB in size — you can't send something like that over the wireless network, so I had to use the smelly USB cable, which had already been airing out on the balcony for a day before this and the smell had eased off a bit. With the margins trimmed and the screen turned to landscape, you can read the book, though the text is rather small and in poor lighting your eyes tire quickly from it, here the Kindle version is definitely better, costing $10, or the original book. Despite the page size, the pages turned quite briskly, I didn't notice any freezing.

I did the same with another book I had also scanned, Part of the Pride: My Life Among the Big Cats of Africa, since the font in it is larger and the pages smaller, the scan in PDF reads in landscape without any problems. The black-and-white text itself doesn't look great when shrunk, either I did something wrong while creating the books or the reader can't shrink two-color text nicely, I don't have much experience with this. I'll have to also try assembling the original raw scans straight into PDF. You can see the current result clearly in the screenshot.

At the end, for the experiment, I converted a normal PDF of the book The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization into the AZW format through the e-mail box. The result came out satisfactory, the diagrams and charts as images look good, plain text is readable, only the tables also became plain text — that can be problematic, but there aren't many of them and you can somehow make out the cell values, an example of such a page with a table is in the screenshot.

About converting the PDF version of various fiction like Richard Castle's books about Nikki Heat there's nothing to say — they convert through the magic box just fine, you can set it so the Kindle reads them aloud itself using the speech synthesizer, provided, of course, that your country's laws allow it.

I was also pleased by the Kindle's ability to send quotes from books and notes on them to Twitter and Facebook, maybe an option like that will come in handy. I'm just delighted with the ability to look up the translation or meaning of words in the dictionary while reading on the go. Now I'll be able to keep expanding my vocabulary, since even now I still don't understand some of the rare words. A pity there was nothing like that when I started reading in English, on top of a stack of printouts of books and stories I also had to lug around the Oxford English-Russian dictionary.

All in all, I'm pleased with the purchase, I hope I'll start reading books again, not as much as before computers came along, but still more.

As promised, here's the table with the tracking of the delivery by the UPS courier service: