pumpkinstrokemarrow

By then I also had a user manual, which thus constitutes my first Kindle accessory, although the £9.60 it cost went to the helpful print shop on West Hill, rather than to Amazon. Much more convenient and probably cheaper than printing the thing myself on my entry level printer.

Thus armed, got to work. The good news is that I now have a decent selection of George Eliot, Conrad, Lawrence, Tolstoy and Joyce on board, courtesy of http://www.gutenberg.org/. Once I got the hang of it, I could get hold of the core Eliot oeuvre in about 5 minutes flat. Taken together, quite enough for standby reading on holiday if nothing else. And now that I have turned the font down to as small as it will go, you get enough on the page to be sensible. It is a bit irritating with the larger fonts, but now the thing works fine. One soon gets used to the feel of it and for reading in bed it is certainly most convenient. (Not checked, but I think you need the light on at night). Our second copy of Middlemarch is already in the recycling bag. Others may follow.

However, there are some niggles.

Despite signing up for the fine looking BT FON service, said by their map to be alive and well in the right part of our road, signal not strong enough to the Kindle to climb onto. So no wifi connection yet to the Kindle HQ and all the good things that that brings with it - including, according to the manual, the ability to lend something to another kindler. Or download your stuff onto your new kindle when that comes along.

The version of 'Women in Love' that I am trying has the irritating feature that odd words are capitalised. I'm sure that did not happen in our Penguin versions. When FIL is out one day I will check. But it seems quite likely that various errors are going to creep into texts of this sort, presumably scanned in from the printed page. On the other hand, spell checkers and such like, not available to old-style printers ought to be a plus.

Another irritating feature is the screen saver which clicks in when you power the thing down. Rather unattractive pictures with a literary theme. OK so the thing is presently kept in what used to be the bag for my cigar impedimenta, itself an offcut from the manufacture of a BH Welsh tweed skirt, but it still irritates on the odd occasion when you do see the pictures. Maybe there is a way to turn them off but I can't find the bit in the manual which says how. Although it does suggest that once wifi'd I might be even more irritated by advertising screen savers.

For me, the whole device might usefully be bigger, say 50% bigger. I dare say the thing is a marvel of miniaturisation but for me bigger would have been better. Bigger screen and bigger keys. OK so you do not need to use the keys very often, but when you do they are a bit small. OK for rioters used to typing messages on their Blackberries in the dark but that is not something that I am into.

All in all, a satisfied customer at the moment. It will be interesting to see how much use I make of the thing. Will BH get on board? I suspect most of the stuff that she reads will have to be paid for, being rather more modern than the fiction that I usually read. Not proposing to use the thing for non-fiction just yet.

PS: the electronic ink screen intrigues. Excellent for this application, but presumably not good for moving pictures and not good for colour.