Me and my Kindle

As I said before, Pace University has given me a tremendous opportunity to beta test the Kindle electronic book reader. The Kindle I have is the larger format version, which translates better to text and reference books. All of my texts were downloaded free to the device and I didn't have to pay for them. All that is great so far. However, rather than a few minutes a book, it took me two days to get my texts. The reason: I discovered that my house does not have good reception for the wireless network used by Amazon. The Kindle uses Sprint's EVDO network (I looked it up) and my office in my house is a dead zone. As soon as I realized what was going on, I began walking around my house to try to get a couple of bars indicating a signal on the device. When I finally found a place where a couple of bars showed up, my books downloaded flawlessly! However, this is the kind of thing someone who has been writing about technology for as long as I have should have known! So all you boomer suburban Kindle users beware: you may have to work a little for your downloads.