I've ordered the OH a kindle which should arrive any day now. Why?! Cos I can and he's wanted one for ages. That and he has surgery imminent for an injury that happened back in April, gotta love the speed of the Army doctors!!! GRRRR

Anyhoo, do they come with any books preloaded? Any tips otherwise? I hear you can get some free titles and download some newspapers onto them? Where a cover is concerned he just wants one he can slide it into and zip shut. Anyone any good recommendations for a decent one?

I dont have a Kindle... BUT

As far as I can tell the secret is to install "Calibre" on your computer so that you can convert any format of ebook to kindle.

That way you have access to ePub format books from the public library as well as any number of freely (and illegally) available books from various torrent sites.

Alternatively of course you could buy every book you want from Amazon and pay lots of money...

Classic stuff is generally free.

You can fiddle things to allow you to pay and download books from the UK or US Kindle store, but you might need a VPN to do the initial stages.

Calibre (with addons) can strip the DRM from the books so you actually own them and can stop Amazon stealing them back. It can also translate epubs across.

You can connect it to a computer and just copy across books, you don't HAVE to go via the Kindle store (although amazon would like you to).

Just have a look through Amazon Masses of covers on there, I had a zipless one to start with but the new one with a zip is safer. If you go into the Kindle store on Amazon you can sort by price so you can see which ones are free, thousands of them. Doesn't come with any preloaded but it only takes about 30 seconds to download each one

I bought my mum a cover with a pull out light so she can read in bed as the kindle is not backlit.

Just buy some books - theyre only like 8$ each

Dracula is free - and scared the bejeebus out of me

Sherlock Holmes - all that is free

crime + punishment is free - amazing book...

And there are lots & lots of 99c books self-published by authors , look for the top sellers and they're usually ok ish.

And.. you can subscribe to newspapers/magazines free for a month - so maybe one of those on there would be nice for him in hostipal.

There is a best sellers list of free books that you can access on the kindle or on the amazon website. There are some quite good books on there, have found some crime thriller style books that are good. You can also sort by price from cheapest so you can find some of the cheaper books to download on the amazon website.

As someone else has said the downloads only take a shorttime to download. Have tried the newspapers, and wasnt very impressed with the conversion to kindle, think it still needs some work doing to get the formatting right - it was a few months back i tried it so dont know what it is like now.

I think you get used to it. My husband happily reads the FT every day and The Economist every week via Kindle. I just wish The Financial Review and The Australian had Kindle versions so we'd have less paper cluttering up the place.

Jen: We got covers from ebay, much cheaper than Amazon.

I wish I had bought that - I bought the kindle leather cover from amazon - and scrimped the 20$ - but reading it in bed and on planes etc that light would've been very useful.

Just bought a couple of clip on lights for $5 each in K Mart yesterday.....so that when I'm dragged to see Cars 2 for the third time I can read my book!

Yeah I saw those today, what batteries do they take?

I like them because the kindle itself charges the light.

From the end of this month, BigW and Dick Smith are going to be selling the Kindle in Australia - both the 3G and Wifi models.

Prices seem to be about the same as importing from Amazon.

Oh really? Cool! The OH still hasn't got a case for his so he'll maybe be able to get one there...

You know you can run Kindle on your iPad? Its brill and better than iBooks