Questions about the Amazon Kindle

[Molo316]

Hello.

In the UK, Father's Day is coming up quite soon, and I'm thinking of getting me Dad an Amazon Kindle.
My question is how do these work? To read books on there, do the files have to be in PDF format, or does it also support other formats?
My friend says that if you were to "acquire" new books that you simply plug the Kindle into a computer, and drag and drop the new files onto it like a USB thumb drive; is this also true?

And finally, what's the best on to go for? I was looking at this one, because it's more modern than the original version, but then there's also this one, however, he'll only be using it at home, and if he goes out I don't think he'll want to hook up to the world wide web or anything as he'll just be a simple and casual user.

Any help is appreciated .

Thanks.

[Tutankhamun]

No idea about PDF's but Amazon has a large number of Ebooks available for sale in their Kindle Store which you can buy directly on the device. Keep in mind those books use DRM and are only readable on a Kindle or a device (such an iOS device etc) with the Kindle app installed.

[Molo316]

Alright, that's fair enough. Cheers for that.

Any recommendation which one I should go for?

[Tutankhamun]

If you think he would take it with him when he travels, and would need newspapers to update over 3G, then the 3G model is the one to go for. But if he'll just use it at home mostly then wifi ought to be good enough.

[squirrelbo1]

Yeah if its just got home use WiFi is perfect. Plus if he has a holiday planned can get them before he leaves. Just like you would do if you bought real books

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2

[Molo316]

Cool, that sounds fair enough.

Alright, thanks guys. Appreciate your responses

[[DT]]

Sorry, I must have missed this the last few visits!

Kindle supports a custom MOBI variant (with DRM), either AZW or KF8 (for newer reader devices and the Kindle Fire) - this is the format you’ll be downloading directly from Amazon. They also support non-DRM based MOBI, PDF, TXT ... and Amazon offers a free conversion gateway to move several other formats into a compatible Kindle format. You can buy/download direct, there’s a couple of Amazon online utilities that allow moving purchases across different devices (using their cloud services), plus the device connected via USB simple mounts as a storage device like a HDD or USB drive, so you just copy files over in the proper directly, unmount and the content will be available.

Like was pointed out, you can share Kindle purchases across a number of devices, whether it’s a native Kindle device or a device running the Kindle app. Your content stays in sync across devices including bookmarks, current page, etc., via WhisperSync, it’s pretty cool. My wife reads quite a bit of Kindle content on her iPhone and occasionally her computer or one of the iPads.

Note that at least with the iOS based devices, you can login to another persons account, download books, logout and back into your own account and the content is stored locally. We do this to avoid syncing confusion if we happen to be reading the same book