After four days of constantly refreshing the USPS package tracking site, my freshly minted Kindle2 arrived with a very unceremonious plop in the mailbox up the street.  Didn’t they know they were supposed to ring the doorbell?!!!  My husband had been ringing the bell all day just to watch me race to the door and then laugh at me.

So, the first 24hrs were mostly spent pining over the fact that I’ve got a crazy weekend with company in town and a writing project in the cliffhanger stage.  I did manage to open the box and plug it in right away.  My very first e-book that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for days, just waiting for my kindle to wake up, popped into the menu on my screen and I happily re-read the first chapter of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.  A dubious honor, but an honor none-the-less that I’m sure John Scalzi will quite appreciate. ahem.  He’ll appreciate the royalty check at the least.

First impressions:  the e-ink thing is crazy.  I’m a gadget user, but don’t care much about how things are built or programmed, so I wasn’t expecting such a different screen.  Once I was convinced that the flash between pages was perfectly normal, I found myself quite able to ignore it completely.  The text is crazy good, with a very soothing eye.  Take this though, as from someone who reads too much on very old computer monitors.  I used the kindle for bedtime reading and found it very relaxing to look at, even in cozy lighting.

The other aspect I have played with a lot over the course of the day has been the document transfers.  Part of my interest was the ability to put my own documents on the kindle and I have uploaded several to my @free.kindle.com address.  The conversions were very quick, the link to the document download was in my mailbox in about five minutes.  My Word story documents tend to get sloppy as they are often hybrid monsters of formatting from google docs, two computers, different venues, and whatever caffine I was on the day I created them.  So I realized after the first couple, that some formatting would be required to get them to look like “stories” on the Kindle screen.  Find/Replace magic has taken care of most of those issues, in my particular cases.  Transferring to the kindle through the USB cable was very easy.

I have lots to explore, and lots to learn, so that is probably enough for now.  I have only been frustrated by a couple of things that I am willing to write off as learning curve.  So far, I’m quite pleased.

The ONLY truly truly frustrating issue has nothing to do with the Kindle itself.  As a tool designed to facilitate reading, I just really with I HAD SOME MORE DAMN TIME TO READ!  Send me a beach and a babysitter and Kindle, I’m all yours.