What to read

Once you have your Kindle, you'll obviously want to fill it with content. :-) Here are some ways to get started.

Books

Obviously, the Kindle was made to read books on it, so this is what it's best at. Buying and reading books is very simple, and after a short time you forget you're using a Kindle. Did I mention how great the e-ink screen is?

Note that while many libraries provide access to e-books for members, this does not work for the Kindle at the moment (DRM issues). The company that distributes these books is called OverDrive - see their website for more details.

Magazines

One area that I had quite high hopes for as I would be very interested in following some international newspapers/magazines. I have subscribed to a German and an English printed newspaper, and of course it should be easier and cheaper to have the files sent to me rather than dead trees, printed on and transported across the continent.

There are some promising beginnings - there's a good enough selection of Newspapers and Magazines in the Kindle store, and I encourage you to give them a try - they all come with a free 14 day trial.

Limitations: often, images and graphics are missing. Sometimes, there are also mistakes in the articles' formatting. This really depends on how much effort the publisher puts into them. Prices I checked were 33% to 50% below the printed (national) subscriptions.

Other stuff

• websites: First of all, you can read websites on the Kindle itself - the browser has an "Article Mode", which is similar to the "Reader Mode" in Safari, i.e. it just leaves the text of an article and removes all the stuff around it. Ideal for websites with long, good texts, e.g. longform.org
• there is also a workaround using Instapaper and Calibre to get websites and feeds onto Kindle.
• Finally, for feeds,there's kindlefeeder.com/ - this lets you subscribe to a number of feeds, which will then get pushed to your Kindle if you click a button.
• files: You can email all sorts of files (word, HTML, pdf, ...) to an address Amazon gives you, and they will send them to your Kindle (this will cost something if you send it over 3G though).