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My 96yr old mother has moved in with us. She reads big print books that are hard to find in the small town midwest. The electronic kindle book is available from Amazon for $139. Any comments on the device, including about it's big print size, and/or the books, would be appreciated. Thanks.

My wife got one. SHe likes it. There is a variety of books avaiable and a bunch of the classics are free. She is happy with it. I have never used it. I like paper books.

The new Kindle 3 rocks. I am at the point I just need reading glasses for print. Flying well over 100k miles per year keeping track of glasses on and off planes is an utter pia...the new Kindle eliminates that problem, along with that of finding interesting new titles in far-off places...

I got one for my mom's birthday which was today. She got it yesterday. In the 2 days she's had it she likes it. The ability to increase font size is a big plus. It will also read the book to you in either a male or female voice but it's not the greatest.

I played with it a while. For reading novels front to back I think it would be pretty handy. Lighter than a regular paperback novel and thinner. If you get the cover you can kinda prop it up to read so you don't even have to hold it.

There are a ton of free books. Many of them books I should have read but never had. The only drawback to me would be 75% of the books I read are technically oriented and kept for reference and there's no good way to just flip thru a book till you see what you want like a regular book. But for novels I think it works good.

I have purchased five Kindles. I read mine daily and love everything about it. I only have about 90 books in archives so far but add to them every week. Would not be without mine.

Forgive me up front if this seems a patently stupid question but do you need a wireless connection to read the Kindle downloads while on airplanes?

For the 3G Kindles (all the ones that don't cost $139) you need to be somewhere that a 3G cell phone would get service (that is, not airborne) to download a book from Amazon; but once you've downloaded the book you can read it anywhere without a connection.

For the WiFi Kindle (the one that does cost $139), you have to be in a WiFi hotspot to download a book from Amazon; but again, you can read it anywhere.

I am still using my Iphone to read books. The app was free, I own the phone anyway, the 3g connection is fast and reliable. The phone stores the current book. and goes back online to get a different one. The books you 'own' are stored on, in my case, Barns and Nobel's web site.

Has anyone managed to get the font size question answered? I tried to check that one out on my wife's Kindle and the "Aa" button that manages font size, screen orientation, and a few other things would only allow for the screen orientation to be rotated around.

I have kind of an old Kindle by now, but with me, I press the "Aa" button to get that menu, and then I move the joystick either left or right to get a smaller or larger font size; once the one I want is underlined, I press the joystick, the menu disappears, and the text size changes.

Have you a different experience?

Yep, when I hit the Aa, only the orientation section would light up. I could see the other options, but all of them were dead. Since the menu was arranged vertically I tried the up & down arrow key which didn't do anything so your mention of left and right made me decide to go try it again just a moment ago. Not sure what the difference was this time, but hitting the Aa button allowed full use of the menu and I would guess the font size can be enlarged to about 1/2" in height and the contrast between the text and back screen is very clear in regards to the earlier query concerning aging eyes.

I've never seen one. How does the Kindle scroll? Does it go down 1 or 2 lines at a time or does it jump a whole screen?

The display technology means it has to jump a whole page at a time. You'll never play video games on a Kindle.

It's not quite as bad as the old Tektronix storage-tube displays, but in general, if you want to change something on the display, you change the whole display.

But that's the way you read a book, right? You jump a whole page at a time?

Thank you,Barak.

I have a Kindel DX love it. Now that my wife has "discovered" it I have to wait in line. Guess I'll have to get another one for her or give her this one and get the new DX for me.

Down at the bottom of the screen are the icons you select to increase font size.

Barack,
Probably a dumb question- will the Kindle display graphs/charts/equations on the screen so I could read technical books on the unit??

MY 83 year old father has an early Kindle and loves it!

My wife has one and she LOVES it. If you have a public library near you, you can also check out books using it for free. They stay on the Kindle for 2 weeks or so and then disappear after the due date is up.

I'm a speed reader although I'm much slower than I used to be. I pretty much take in a paragraph at a time. A line by line scroll would get very obnoxious after a while.