At last, the Amazon Kindle that I have been coveting ever since Amazon.com introduced the Kindle 2.0 is in my hands. I could barely contain my glee when Amazon announced that they were releasing the International version of Kindle. However to my mortification, I later found out  that even the International version of Kindle wasn’t shipped to Maldives. Not surprising considering the fact that a special wireless internet connection labelled Whispernet is used to communicate between Kindle and Amazon.com in order to purchase and deliver books, which is not available in the Maldives.

Since I read a lot of eBooks, I still found myself looking at avenues through which I could obtain a Kindle for my use. I hit jackpot when one of the sellers on Ebay with a good seller reputation advertised that they shipped Kindle to countries other than US. The waiting period for the Kindle to arrive was an agonizing but it was well worth the wait.

The first thing one needs to do when the Kindle is received is to register the device. Since Whispernet network is not available in the Maldives, this could be done by visiting the “Manage your kindle” page on Amazon.com. After registering, once I purchase a Kindle version of the book, I would be able to download the book onto my computer and then transfer the file onto my Kindle for reading. Apart from the Amazon’s proprietary DRM-restricted format (AZW) format, Kindle also supports unprotected .prc files and HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion. As long as Kindle supports the .prc versions I don’t think I am going to have any problems using Kindle.

To get me started on using Kindle, this website also provided some cool tips. I guess I will know more about this much coveted device of mine once I actually get to do some reading on it. After picking it up from the Post Office this afternoon and getting to know the device, I haven’t had much time to do any solid reading yet. And the ability to listen to music on Kindle whilst reading, now ain’t that just cool! 😉

So till my next review!