Comments on: Random House is giving away books to iPhone owners

By: mrfearless47

mrfearless47 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:11:58 +0000

I’ve got a Kindle and a 3G iphone. I also have Stanza installed on the iPhone. I much prefer the Kindle for actual reading as the screen is larger, you can adjust font sizes to whatever works with your eyes. The Kindle also stores a ton of books. Right now, I have about 50 full length books stored on the Kindle, and another 30 or 40 stored on an SD card. I archive all my books on SD cards and on Amazon so that I can recover them whenever I want. This works great for the “favorite” book re-readers. There is no easy way to archive books from the iPhone. The Kindle comes with a built in archiving feature — Amazon itself — and the SD card of up to 4 GB, which holds an awful lot of books. My 50 full length books right now take up about 1/3 of the Kindle’s built in memory. The SD card is barely over empty with 30 books on it. I think the Kindle’s rated capacity is about 200 books without the SD card. Add the SD card and you’ve probably got room for another 400 books. That’s a lot of books to have handy in a single unit.

By: fotostuf

fotostuf — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:57:41 +0000

I LOVE reading on my iPhone… but I worry if I’ll drop it in the toilet! ;-D

Kindle and eReader should worry… I have tried the Kindle and don’t understand why anyone would lug around such a large and bulky item that does nothing but provide reading material. Paperbacks are much lighter and easier to use, and there are still a few newspapers around for that occasional read. Not only that, but you can mark up real books all you want, take notes in the margins, and just plain personalize it in any way imaginable. Don’t think they have a note feature on Kindle, do they?

Yes, many titles can be stored in such technology, but my wonderful iPhone does that and so much more. Maybe they should add a phone to the Kindle! ;-D

I wonder if anyone has researched how much reading material is actually stored on a Kindle… is it removed after a time, somehow archived, or what? I have books dating back decades that I read over and over. I would hate to lose them to a momentary lack of memory on a reading device…

By: Mario

Mario — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:16:34 +0000

I read probably about 20 full length books on my iPhone using Stanza and I love it. I like the convenience of having the book with me at all times. I can pick it up at any time and read for a few minutes. Before I had an iPhone I used my Palm device to do the same. I looked at the Kindle and the Sony ready but two things turn me off right away:
1. Price – I will not spend that much money on just a booke reader.
2. Format, size. It’s too big to carry. I put my iPhone in my pocket and go. I can’t do that with a Kindle.

Mario