The Amazon Kindle 3 that I order has finally arrived. I've been wanting to get that for the longest time.

You might ask what's an art book lover doing with a Kindle? Besides art books, I read other stuff like thrillers (Michael Crichton type), business books and other miscellaneous enrichment books.

Books are great but they take up space...

Lots of space if you have lots of books. That's why I prefer the Kindle to physical books. You get to save a lot of space, and trees.

These are the two boxes that arrived. I ordered the Kindle with a Lighted Leather Cover.

Kindle 3 is currently only sold by Amazon US and Amazon UK. But they do ship to selected countries. If you're located in a country where Amazon doesn't ship to, like in Singapore where I live, there are ways to buy it and have it mailed to you. I'll write a buying guide for that later.

The Kindle 3 comes with a USB cable that can be attached to a power plug. You can use the USB cable for charging and transferring ebooks.

It's really thin and light. It's really comfortable to be holding it reading for hours. I hold that with one hand on my 45-min train ride to work and it never feels tiring.

Yes, it's extremely portable.

If you're going to be putting the Kindle with stuff like keys, phone or stuff, it's probably good to invest in a cover. I use the cover for protection while traveling, but I take the cover off when I'm reading because the Kindle is so much lighter without it.

The contrast of the screen is great. Paper is still more white, but the reading experience is as close as it can get - to the point where I wish all books in the future be published with an alternative ebook version.

Eyestrain is not a problem unless in poorly lit room - you'll get eyestrain with a physical book in that condition as well.

The unit is responsive. Page redraws are quick. The user interface is also quite snappy.

One thing I didn't like is there's no equivalent of flipping through large number of pages. On the Kindle, you have to enter a page number and jump there. Although if you want to find stuff, you can do a keyword search.

You can rotate the layout of the ebook but that has to be done manually. That is automatic in the Kindle DX - 2.5 times more expensive.

Because the way some ebooks are formatted, the text are going to be too small if read in the vertical portrait format, such as the camera manual (PDF file) I loaded in the picture above.

If you're getting ebooks from Amazon, they will be properly formatted to be read on the Kindle held upright. And you can change the size of text, line-spacing, typeface with Amazon ebooks - not so with PDF files.

The file formats accept are Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.

Image files can be read with conversion which I haven't figure out how to do that yet. Anyway, images don't look very good in grayscale - Kindle's 16-level gray scale is good for text but not for images. Manga should be alright since they are in black and white anyway, but manga pages are typically larger than the Kindle's 6-inch screen.

You can hold up to 4 GB of ebooks - with some capacity held up by the system.

The text for this PDF ebook is quite small as well. With PDFs, it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get. If the text is too small, you have to rotate the viewing layout.

I've to rotate the layout to make the text larger and more legible.

There's no problem reading other languages besides English. Sometimes I would copy Japanese text from websites and create my own PDFs (using NeoOffice or OpenOffice) just to learn some Japanese. When you're creating your own ebook, you can choose the font, size, and layout.

Battery life is great. Basically, power is used only for screen redraws, such as flipping a page. When the content is already drawn onto the page, it no longer uses any power. It can last a month of reading (claims) with one charge. It's easy to understand why.

Whether you want to get the Wifi or 3G version depends on your travel and purchasing habits.

If you're using the Kindle at home or near Wifi spots, 3G isn't necessary. If you don't mind buying ebooks on your computer and transferring to your Kindle via USB, 3G isn't necessary.

3G version is good for those who want to buy books as and when they want.

The other feature that I like about the Kindle is really the lack of non-reading related features - you can't download apps, the included web browser isn't that good, in-built mp3 player is like the 1st generation iPod Shuffle. There's nothing to distract you from reading, which I think is a major feature in today's world where there are so many distractions.

If you love reading, I highly recommend the Kindle.

I love it.

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Available at:

• Kindle 3 (6") (Amazon.com)
• Kindle DX (9.7") (Amazon.com)
• Kindle 3 (6") (Amazon.co.uk)