Kindle and what not to do.

I think that's because they are written by gnomes in the bowels of the obfuscation departments of the companies concerned

And these gnomes find out which country the gadget is going to be used in and write the instructions very poorly in another language altogether, usually one that nobody can understand!

Congrats on the new Kindle!

Do you have to pay to download books, or is there a free library? I am not sure what my sister has, but she would download free from a library and the book would be automatically deleted after a three weeks. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

You can get books from the library on Kindle but there are limited loads and they expire after a time. There is a website called "books on the knob" which will send you email daily alerting you to free and low cost deals in Kindle and other formats.

That sounds very rude

You can download a lot of stuff from Gutenberg for free, mostly classics. My ereader came with 100 classics preloaded and my wife likes to boast that she has over 1800 books on her ereader, but has only actually bought a handful of books. The rest she downloaded legally for free. It helps that she likes a lot of public domain stuff.

I didn't make that up. That's what it's really called.
http://blog.booksontheknob.org

Thanks for the Kindle info. I believe I'll put it on my Christmas list.

Most of the books I have on my Kindle were free. I happen to love Classics, which are out of copyright! There are also a large number of very cheap books - most of my purchased ones were 89p and on eBay you can buy cds with thousands of Kindle books on them. That's not really how I'd do it because the books that I would want to read on the train tend to be very specific rather than just something I picked up ... if you see what I mean. S

Just a note for anyone who is contemplating a Kindle Fire purchase. Its web browser will display this site and will respond to the buttons for "activity", "last read" etc.; however, the story frame will not scroll, so you cannot read stories.