Kindle desired have questions before committment

[ashleidb]

I am extremely interested in buying the kindle. I am a student and would like to download all my books rather than buy them all.Is there any sites that offer that type of service and is the kindle able to do that? I really want one. Someone please help, school starts in a couple weeks.

[drenee]

Welcome to the Boards.  I do not know a great deal about any particular site that is offering textboooks other than Amazon.  I believe the DX is what others are using specifically for their class work.  I know we have some other threads around here that would address your concerns.  Perhaps if you go to the search feature at the top right hand side of the Boards and type in DX, you may find some of your answers that way.
Good luck.
deb

[Scheherazade]

I used my K2 last semester for school.  If you check the publishers' websites you can sometimes find textbooks there for download in electronic form.  I have also heard that Amazon is really working on bulking up their textbook offerings before the upcoming semester, but they better hurry cuz it's started soon.  None of my professors have given me book lists yet so I can't say how many I can get this semester, but last semester I got over half of my books on my Kindle for way cheaper than the bookstore or even half.com in a lot of cases.

This really depends on your area of study though.  I'm a History major with an English minor so a lot of what I wanted to find was already there.  For my English class it was almost all public domain novels that I got for free, but I couldn't get the huge reader text that was the main book for the class and the biggest pain to carry and read.  In my History classes I found almost everything I needed, but again a lot of this was public domain available for the general masses and not there necessarily as a textbook.

You also want to keep in mind that the Kindle doens't have page numbers.  I rarely had trouble keeping up in class and even found it to be a huge advantage to be able to search my books for keywords while everyone else had to thumb through the pages.  You can also do some pretty simple math to get an estimate of a page number from the actual text for citing purposes or even use google books.  My professors would not let me use Kindle locations on my citations so these are the two methods I used.  I did, however, write my entire Senior Seminar term paper using nothing but my Kindle and .pdf documents and got high remarks from my professor.

I'm really happy with my Kindle for school and plan to get a DX at some point due to the propensity of my professors to assign .pdf for regular reading during class.  I just wish I had it for my Maritime History course because he didn't even have a textbook and simply assigned us thousands of pages of through .pdf files and it was such a pain to print.  I'm not sure about the trade off on not being able to highlight in the .pdfs, but I figure it's better than printing all those pages and trying to force staples through them.  You -can- highlight in normal books and bookmark .pdfs though, so I am betting this is a workable solution for me.

I'll be glad to answer anymore questions you have from my own experiences, just keep in mind that my major will slightly skew the results a bit.