Kindle Fire Review

A Review of the Kindle Fire by our webmaster. This review is not an official position or advice from Project Gutenberg or the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

Summary

Don't buy a Kindle Fire, buy a Nexus 7 instead.

Or buy one of the not-Fire Kindle models if you can live with an e-ink screen.

Details

If you want to read free ebooks, don't buy the Kindle Fire. Amazon has locked down the Fire to make it hard to get any content to it you didn't buy from Amazon. It is a huge step back in freedom from the Kindle 3.

Even Apple has not gone so far as Amazon in locking down their devices. You can easily download and read ebooks on Apple devices using only the standard apps.

You can get free ebooks to the Fire too, but the process is so cumbersome that it isn't worth the trouble given the alternative of buying a Nexus 7, which handles free ebooks with ease.

To be specific, there is no way to download free books from the web and have the Kindle Fire store them permanently or in the same places where your books from Amazon are kept. This was easy with the Kindle 3. No more. To work around this deliberate limitation of the Kindle Fire you have to either:

• Use a PC to send your files to the Kindle Fire, but that will work only near your PC, or
• install a third party app called a file manager and manually move every book you downloaded into the right folder, but that makes every download of a new book into a dozen-clicks affair instead of a one-click task like on the Kindle 3, or
• install a third party EPUB reader and download free EPUB books instead of free Kindle books, but that implies learning and using two different apps to read books on the same device.

If the Kindle Fire was the only game in town you'd have to swallow all this, but fortunately there's an alternative that doesn't impose all these limitations on you and costs even less.

Buying the Google Nexus 7 you get virtually the same hardware and save $25.

The smallest Nexus 7 costs the same as the smallest Kindle Fire but includes a wall charger, which costs $10 extra for the Kindle and has no annoying ads on the screensaver, which costs another $15 to disable on the Kindle.

The bigger Fire models also have Nexus equivalents which cost less.

To read Project Gutenberg ebooks on your Kindle Fire

Follow these steps:

1. Don't buy a Kindle Fire in the first place but buy a Nexus 7.
2. If you have already bought a Kindle Fire, return it, and then buy the Nexus 7.
3. If you cannot return your Kindle Fire, install a third party EPUB reader and start downloading the EPUB files instead of the Kindle files from this site. One good and free EPUB reader is FBReader. Download the Android .2* package for the Kindle Fire and the Android 4.* package for the Kindle Fire HD. You may want to read up on installing third party apps on the Kindle Fire. Advantages of EPUB files over Kindle files include: that they are much smaller than Kindle files and that they work on the Apple iPad too.