A reason not to buy the much touted "green" Amazon Kindle..

[MR GUS]

I love books, real books..
However the wife who reads precisely b*gger all has been "on a whim" wanting one, & cursing me for constructively arguing against them.
Turns out THE BATTERY IS NOT REPLACEABLE,
Amazon will sell you a reduced price replacement kindle (no price agreed yet after a year on sale & it's already got multiple versions out).

So hardly green, more like a corporate concern, you merely rent it, anyone got one? can you access the battery compartment & is there anything out there as a direct replacement without buying into more kindles? 

This should shut the wife up! 

[2807]

Turns out THE BATTERY IS NOT REPLACEABLE,

Looking on fleabay for "kindle battery" - it seems that this is not the case......

2807

[supremetwo]

Turns out THE BATTERY IS NOT REPLACEABLE,

Plenty on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle-Replacement-Battery-Generation/dp/B000I6P1UA

[MR GUS]

I have a feeling they'll eventually seal it in like apple products.
However thanks for pointing out cheap replacements, i'll hide that fact from the wife. 

[onetoremember]

I have recently bought a kindle and love it. For me it does not replace a book as it is more a different type of media so I still buy books and I buy ebooks for my Kindle (and to read on the PC). I have just read a very good technical book to help me with some photography software - Adobe Lightroom 3. I read the book as I worked through the program on the PC. Then I read the next chapter and then worked through it on the PC. It worked really well.

Here is the link to the review I wrote on Amazon.

http://www.http://onetoremember.co.uk/community/index.php/topic,2655.msg2745/topicseen.html#msg2745

Is the kindle green - I am not sure. With books they can be read over and over again by many many people.... not sure this is the case for the Kindle.

[acresswell]

Don't forget 3 other advantages of traditional books...
   they keep working even during the longest powercuts
   covering walls with bookshelves gives extra insulation
   and you can always burn them if it gets really cold!

[onetoremember]

Agree and good for wobbly tables too.

Not sure about you but the thought of throwing away a book is very hard for me - off to oxfam.....  But deleting an ebook is easy...

[tony.]

I have a kindle and think its great, however i was at our boating club on saturday for an open day and couldnt resist the allure of proper books, so got a dozen books for under 2 quid.

Got tne last few lee child jack reacher novels and they were 5-6 quid each.

Running out of space for the properbooks so kindles are good.

 downside i dont like the % of the book read displayed i would prefer a page number.
Also tried sending a few pdfs to it and it didnt work, will try again as its a good size , for refering to technical manuals.

Getting the hang of the ipad as well, but not being able to use a windows  usb hard disk is a pain
And a spell check would be good for emails.

Tony

[Quakered]

My iPad (2...) spell checks emails, albeit using an American dictionary with all this misspelling that involves!

Also the iBook app shows page numbers.

Surely downloading books is vastly greener than sacrificing all those trees in China and then shipping them around the world to be read once and then clutter up shelf space. I know somethings are best in physical books but if it is text and you are only going to read it once then let's go electronic! also as already said, for manuals they are brilliant electronically.

[MR GUS]

if anyone has a longterm footprint report on this sort of thing downloads including the reader, vs books i'd be interested.

[wyleu]

But deleting an ebook is easy...

Do you get any money back for doing that?

[Contadino]

If you're after a reason not to buy a Kindle, just the fact that they're manufactured by Foxconn should be enough. That's the sweatshop where they've had so many worker suicides that everyone has now had to sign a contract agreeing to not kill themselves, and if they do kill themselves, that the family cannot sue Foxconn. The same company that chained up all their fire escapes, as too many worker were using them to get onto the roof so they could throw themselves off.  The same company that has mandatory 110 hour working weeks. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

BTW, iPads, iPhones and all sorts of other fashionable 5-minute-wonder toys are made in the same 600,000 worker factory.