Recently in Kindle Category

Buying books published by O'Reilly is a great thing, and getting them for less than full price at Amazon is a greater thing.

Then I see a banner ad that I'm compelled to click on. Hey there world, Web advertising works! So buy more damn ads, you engines of commerce, you.

I click the ad and am led to the O'Reilly store at Amazon, where everything is cheaper than if you went to O'Reilly's own Web site to purchase books.

But you can still save money by purchasing O'Reilly titles as Ebooks from the O'Reilly site.

And O'Reilly seems very flexible when it comes to what device you can use to read your Ebook, everything from Kindle to iPhone to a plain ol' computer.

The New York Times rounds up the latest on mobile devices that might do a better job than the Kindle at rendering newspaper content in electronic form, including a bigger Kindle and the much-anticipated Plastic Logic device. Plus there's Apple possibly making a move.

This blog and my weekly print column don't cross paths much, but it's time to change that and help readers tap the resources I write about in the Saturday edition of the Daily News (Page 2 of the Faith section, where Business currently lives, as well as the aforementioned online home.)

The Saturday, Feb. 7 column is about self-publishing, ideally with no cost to you, both in traditional printed books as well as in electronic form on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Links mentioned in the column:

• "Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature," Time magazine, Jan. 21, 2009
• Self-publishing with Amazon.com
• CreateSpace — on-demand publishing (for free!!) through Amazon.com
• The definitely not-free BookSurge from Amazon
• Self-publishing company iUniverse
• Amazon's Kindle electronic reader

I've heard so much praise for Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device but little dissent.

I've only seen the Sony version of the reader, which uses much of the same hardware as the Amazon model. What stopped me from gushing over the device was its screen. The way the words look is more than a little bit crude, and I found that page turns took too long. I'd much rather have a regular book or even a PDF on a PC than what the Kindle and Sony models offer.

Today I see a ZDNet post from David Morgenstern, who also doesn't think the Kindle has what it takes to beat either the iPhone as an e-reader or a real book:

One of my neighbors, a designer of hardware interfaces for professional video editing systems, bought a Kindle a couple of months ago. He put it up for sale on eBay less than a day later. He said the hardware design was "terrible."

After borrowing and using his Kindle, I understood his rejection of the device. It presents a cluttered interface. And worse, it changed pages when I picked it up, with my fingers touching the long Previous and Next Page bars on the sides. This was his experience as well. (I notice from most publicity photos that the Kindle is held in the left hand from the lower left corner. Maybe that's the secret but that's awkward.)

In addition, I found the roller bar and its cursor track icon difficult to line up with items on the screen. And its browser was very slow.