Kindle Fire Review

[kullatiro]

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Kindle_Fire_Review

Kindle Fire Review
From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free
ebooks.
A Review of the Kindle Fire by our webmaster. This
review is not an official position or advice from
Project Gutenberg or the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation.
Summary
Don't buy a Kindle Fire, buy a Nexus 7 instead.
Or buy one of the not-Fire Kindle models if you can
live with an e-ink screen.
Details
If you want to read free ebooks, don't buy the
Kindle Fire. Amazon has locked down the Fire to
make it hard to get any content to it you didn't buy
from Amazon. It is a huge step back in freedom from
the Kindle 3.

Even Apple has not gone so far as Amazon in locking
down their devices. You can easily download and
read ebooks on Apple devices using only the
standard apps.

You can get free ebooks to the Fire too, but the
process is so cumbersome that it isn't worth the
trouble given the alternative of buying a Nexus 7,
which handles free ebooks with ease.

To be specific, there is no way to download free
books from the web and have the Kindle Fire store
them permanently or in the same places where your
books from Amazon are kept.

This was easy with the Kindle 3. No more. To work around this deliberate limitation of the Kindle Fire you have to either:
Use a PC to send your files to the Kindle Fire, but
that will work only near your PC, or install a third party app called a file manager and manually move every book you downloaded into the right folder, but that makes every download of a new book into a dozen-clicks affair instead of a one- click task like on the Kindle 3, or install a third party EPUB reader and download free EPUB books instead of free Kindle books, but that implies learning and using two different apps to read books on the same device.

If the Kindle Fire was the only game in town you'd
have to swallow all this, but fortunately there's an
alternative that doesn't impose all these limitations
on you and costs even less.

Buying the Google Nexus 7 you get virtually the
same hardware and save $25. The smallest Nexus 7 costs the same as the smallest Kindle Fire but includes a wall charger, which costs $10 extra for the Kindle and has no annoying ads on the screensaver, which costs another $15 to disable
on the Kindle. The bigger Fire models also have Nexus equivalents which cost less.