Amazon Kindle, Working around regional restrictions…

Few weeks back, a friend of mine was visiting the US for some business of his own, and I couldn’t help to ask him to bring back an Amazon Kindle for me…

I choose the cheapest model, the one with the WIFI only, with 6" screen, it seemed satisfactory to my needs, I won’t need to 3G thing as I don’t want to pay data transfer fees for downloading the ebooks to my kindle, and the 3G won’t add much value to me…

Anyway, I was thrilled to put my hands on it, and I started to ease myself into reading books on that lovely device, I went ahead and set my regional settings to the US, and started browsing the free ebooks available on Amazon’s Kindle Store, I downloaded over 6 ebooks in less than 1 hour, and downloaded samples for 4 more…

A Book worm…

In a previous blog entry, I’ve mentioned some guy on the internet who used to read 80~90 books per year…

Well, I met one of those book worms in the flesh…

We needed to upgrade one of the most critical network systems at work to the newest release, and the vendor sent out one of his best guys, he was named Scott…

When he showed up on Thursday, he had a book (a pretty thick one) with a bookmarker in the middle of it, we had a quick meeting, decided what to be done and when, and that was it for the day, nothing big…

At night (Friday night), when we went to implement the actual upgrade, the guy showed up with an entirely new book, almost as thick as the one I saw with him this morning, and to my surprise, the bookmarker was in the middle of that book too !!!

When we were half way through the upgrade process, we took a break and I decided to ask him; "So, you usually hop across books ? maybe you don’t want to be bored by reading only one?", he replied; "No, what made you say that?", I couldn’t help to tell him my observation…

And he just said,"Naaaah,I’ve finished the other book, and started this one today" …

And I dared to ask him, "how many books do you usually read per month?", he just thought briefly and said "mmmmm, around 25 to 30 books per month, when I had to move to another house I faced a major problem moving my library along with me, 30 or 35 big boxes all full of books, it was a nightmare, not to mention the books I had to leave behind, and the books had to sell" …

We needed to continue on Saturday night, and yet again the guy showed up with yet another book, with the bookmarker near the beginning of it this time, seeing the question in my eyes he simply explained without being actually asked; "I had a long night sleep, didn’t have much time to read" …