I was the thrilled recipient of an Amazon Kindle DX for Christmas. I knew that the Kindle had wireless Internet via a fee-free arrangement with Sprint. I knew that I could use the Kindle to buy books on the fly and surf the web from a basic browser. But what I did not know was that the Kindle also contains an mp3 player, filed in a menu alongside other experimental features like text-to-speech.
The sound quality is surprising good, and the device has 2GB of storage. The in-Kindle mp3 player is nothing to write home about — it’s basically an iPod shuffle with no shuffle built in — but I’m hoping that a firmware upgrade will yield improvements on this tidy and lovely bonus feature.
And on a related note, here is what I’m listening to as I read cheerful holiday fare like What They Left Behind, a book about the lives of ten patients at the turn of the century and the contents of their suitcases left behind at the Willard state mental institution in New York.
- Pony Boy – Last Day of the 20th Century
- Sarah Harmer – Silver Road
- It’s A Musical – Dinosaur
- Mark Kozelek – Celebrated Summer (Husker Du cover)
- Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
A truly awesome book.
My dad bought both himself and my mom Kindles for Xmas – himself the DX, my mom the little one (classic dad). But I know they love them, and the MP3 feature makes a pretty compelling case for one. That is, with all the disposable income I just discovered (ssshhhhhh…not really).
I frankly have always had trouble understanding the allure of Fleet Foxes. Mark Kozelek covering Celebrated Summer? That I could get behind, having once attempted to cover that song and having made a blood-curdling mess out of it.