Waiting for me in Indiana was a plain black box holding my first Kindle reader—the Paperwhite. I decided to leapfrog over the basic $69 Kindle reader because the new one has internal lighting. It also turns out it is navigated by a touch screen…only one button that turns it on and off. Having viewed the Revisiting Scripture E-book files on the previewer on my computer, I had a good idea of how the text might look, but the previewer was so erratic or fussy I wasn’t sure what the real thing would do. In the end it seems OK, but I think I had an older E-book file than the one online…several things were improved in the intense week of html fixing, and the final online version had the TOC (table of contents) with indents to differentiate outline levels while the one I viewed on the reader was with all the entries at the left edge. I have also discovered that adding some book marks in the WORD file will show up as GOTO items which could make it possible to hop around without having to jump back to the TOC all the time. Oh, by the way, there still seem to be a few typos…I hope to fix them in a few weeks after I finish the second volume.
The reader hardware itself seems fine, although a bit heavier than a paperback of similar size…of course it is far lighter if set next to the stack of some 1000 paperbacks it could hold! The lighting feature seems just fine…brightness can be varied almost continuously and the slight variation at the bottom seems negligible.
It seems that the efforts to use this reader as an iPad-like web tool are destined for failure…the web content I have seen that has heavy picture/graphical content is not configured for the low resolution and size of the reader, so any diagrams come out tiny and illegible. I now understand how the publishing of E-books with pictures requires careful sizing and selection of images…not impossible ..not even difficult…but not a direct conversion from a print version.
I now know why electrical plug strips and other devices include USB-like connections for charging. The Kindle charges only through the tiny USB connector, via the supplied cable, but I discovered my laptop does not supply USB power when off, hibernating, or asleep, so it has to be left on for hours to charge the reader. I discover that it is possible to load content into the reader via the USB port…handy since the WiFi connection is not of clear use for such activity except bringing material down from the Amazon cloud storage. I have to research whether you can upload to the cloud any material that is not officially obtained through Amazon.
In any case, the good news is that my first E-book now works just fine on the Paperwhite reader!