What is a Kindle?

Simply defined, a Kindle is an electronic book reader created and developed by Amazon. Right now, there have been three versions released, with the newest one called as the Kindle DX. The purpose of this gadget is to allow users to read and carry copies of their favorite e-books while on the go.

When the Kindle device was first released in November 2007, Amazon reported that it sold out within 5 hours. That product is exclusively intended for the US market only. This only goes to show that more Americans are making the switch from paperbacks to e-books drastically. Although an electronic device, Kindle displays e-books in the electronic paper format, making the experience very similar to reading an actual book, only in a lot more portable way.

Kindle can connect through the internet initially through the local Sprint network. But with the move to market the device internationally, the provider was changed to AT&T. E-books for your Kindle can be downloaded over Amazon's Whispernet portal, which carries thousands of titles for sale.

Kindle II supports an expansion memory slot, allowing users to add e-books from their computers. However, this was removed with the newer Kindle DX, because it holds much higher memory space. Users that would like to transfer e-books from their computers to the Kindle DX would simply have to synchronize the two devices together.

Kindle supports major book formats such as the Mobipocket books, topaz format books, and of course, Amazon's AZW book format. It can also read plain text files. The support for PDF is only available for Kindle DX. HTML pages and Microsoft Word files can be converted through Amazon's email-based formatting service. Since the device can access the internet, one simply has to send the files that they want to be converted into a Kindle readable format to Amazon and attach the file. It will then be sent back to them, ready for viewing.