Kindled, but Not Enlightened

Amazon's Kindle provides a better read than earlier electronic-book devices, but technical glitches remain. (By Tan Ly -- The Washington Post)

This Sprint-supplied "Whispernet" service, however, has major gaps in rural areas, starting as close as 30 miles from the District. Users in the country may need to download books to their computers, then copy them to a Kindle. It also will drain Kindle's battery; I had to recharge it about every two days.

The inconvenience factor of reading on a Kindle should justify a healthy discount over the price of paper books, but you may not save much money this way. Most Kindle books cost $9.99, only $5 or so off Amazon's print price. Some provide no discount.

The site also stocks digital versions of 11 newspapers and 8 magazines (including The Post and its Slate.com site), plus 310 blogs. Newspapers cost from $5.99 to $14.99 a month, magazines $1.25 to $3.49. Almost all blogs cost $0.99 or $1.99 a month.

These books come wrapped in "digital rights management" software that prevents you from printing them, reading them on another device or loaning them to friends.

Adding other content takes a little tinkering. You can plug a Kindle into a computer to copy over text and MP3 files. Transferring items such as Microsoft Word or PDF files requires e-mailing them to Amazon, which will either e-mail them back to you or, for 10 cents each, zap them to the Kindle.

And yet, you can get lost in a compelling book on the Kindle. You can start to forget the plastic around the words -- so long as the Kindle doesn't crash.

The review unit loaned by Amazon froze on a page I was reading several nights ago, then stayed stuck through the next morning. Nothing would clear the screen and wake the thing up -- not pressing the reset switch beneath the back cover, not removing the battery.

Amazon's tech support answered almost immediately but could only suggest replacing the Kindle. Finally, I tried plugging it in.

That somehow revived the device. The screen flashed on and off a few times, the Kindle rebooted, and I could resume my reading -- an excerpt of a book called "Dreaming in Code," which explains how hard it is to write good software.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/.