From the “Oops! My finger slipped!” purchase button press, to the nice UPS deliver man who knows my name showing up at my door, took less than 48 business hours. I have to stop buying things on Thursday and hoping they’ll show up on Friday. Packaging is what you come to expect from niche little products like this. Amazon has taken a page from Apple’s book with it’s packaging materials and made uncrating things an experience in itself. I already had my online accounts setup as I was using the Kindle PC to test it out. Browsing for books was a bit difficult, but I suppose only really because I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. A problem I have when going to actual stores as well. I can’t go in looking for something to read, I get overwhelmed rather quickly. I eventually found something, did the order process bit and it showed up on my kindle within seconds. That’s awesome. Just awesome.

Getting down to actual reading was a treat as well. I changed the font size to a much lower value so I could read more on a page. I found I was pressing “Next Page” every few seconds with some books which gets annoying. My wife and I compared the real book she was reading with the Kindle side by each. There wasn’t much difference to be honest. The colour of the page felt the same and text was the same font. I’ve gone through a couple books already and have no qualms about the actual act of reading off the Kindle.

One of the big benefits I’ve come across is that I’ve already read two books I wouldn’t have read otherwise, simply because it was so convenient to do so. A $2 book with one button press and I’m reading it 3 seconds later? Talk about instant gratification. I find I browse genres I wouldn’t normally in a book store. Can’t really explain why that might be, but it’s increased my interest in reading outside my comfort zone.

Alright, I said I wouldn’t, but I can’t resist. There are three things disabled on Kindle Global for Canadian users. You can’t browse the full internet like you can with the US version. You have access to Amazon.com and Wikipedia however. I assume this is a limitation enforced by Rogers whose 3G network is crap despite marketing material to the contrary. An extension to that is that you can’t subscribe to blog RSS feeds either, a feature that would have been wonderful to have. This also means that emailing content directly to your Kindle is also disabled, which isn’t a big deal since I believe it would cost a dollar to do so. I’ll have to do it manual way and save that dollar I guess.

All said and done, I love it. For reading novels, it’s the way to go for me. Anything with pictures is getting the old fashioned tree killing version. If you have any interest in getting one, just do it. You won’t regret it.