eawerner
Member
Do any of you have a Kindle Fire that you use for books with pictures in them? We have a regular Kindle which is fine for reading our literature chapter books to dd but I'm wondering if it would be nice to have one to get some of the more picture filled books on. I can't decide if it would be a good idea or not. Any thoughts?
(sorry I couldn't decide which forum to stick this in)
Bookworm
Member
I have a Nook Color, similar to a Fire. I like it very much. Yes, I was able to see some photos and other pictures in one of the books I read quite well. Plus websites, and magazines! I LOVE getting my magazines on the Nook Color. I think they are great. I have to confess that Doug is right--the Ipad will do more stuff. But we ended up with four tablets for the price of one Ipad so we are pretty happy.
aylin
Member
Picture books look wonderful on the Kindle Fire. I say go for it!!
sbkrjulie
Member
I have a Fire as well and love seeing the book covers in color. I have some picture books on them too and the graphics are great!!! I plan on using my Fire for the Modules too as it can handle PDF files. Kids don't know it yet but I can know take all of our lessons with us when we travel on vacation, etc LOL
Keep in mind that many books from Amazon were designed for the original Kindle and only contain black and white images. But it does work quite well for books that have been built with color images. The other thing to know is that the Fire's screen is not huge so illustrations look good but images needing to show lots of details might be a bit small. You can zoom in on parts of the image to get around that. However, Amazon financially penalizes publishers if the file size of their book is too large, so many won't contain much more detail than what fits on the screen.
Can you tell we've been digging into all these details in working on our most recent SCM books? 
So in what other ways (other than reading a book) can the Kindle Fire be utilized with SCM?
You can view the SCM website, interact on the forum, download books, and mostly use the CM Organizer (dragging to order chapters doesn't work on the Kindle.) I do find the screen a bit small for some of those things but it does work.
Rebekahy
Member
Bookworm - I'd love to know which tablets you have beside the Nook. We have a gift certificate to Best Buy that will not purchase an IPAD, but would come close to getting a Kindle Fire or the like... I've been leaning toward one of the more obscure tablets becaue I'd like a bigger screen for those PDF files I have and would love to hear if you have one you recommend.
Thanks!
Bookworm
Member
We have two Nook Colors, one Arcos 70 and one Dell Streak. Kids shopped like crazy until they found reconditioned Arcos and Dell; dh got my Nook on a huge sale and then won his. :-)
Des
Member
Bookworm, if you had a choice, would you choose the Nook Colors or the Kindle Fire? I'm trying to decide between these two or being patient and getting an Ipad (i'll have to save forever for this though!)
Bookworm
Member
Hmm. My ds says go Kindle Fire as it's better at playing videos. I'm content with what I have, though. I have it set up to run Android and do a few apps but almost all I do is read books, magazines, blogs and webzines. I'd probably pick again what I have since I'm happy with it. I'll ask ds for some tech blog comparisons if you want later. The WSJ techie guy liked the Nook better except for video capability and then he liked the Fire better.
I have an iPad, iPhone, Kindle (b&w keyboard model), Kindle Fire, Nook Simple Touch, and Nook Tablet (like the Nook Color but upgraded specs) here that we use for testing our e-books.
From purely an e-book production standpoint, Nook is much harder to get ePub books formatted to look nice. It simply ignores many of the formatting commands so it makes it much harder. The end result is that books will often not look quite as nice on the Nook as other readers because it's too much hassle or not possible to do what we want.
Other than that I find the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet to be very similar in capability, speed, readability, size, and weight. The Nook is a little less chunky to hold because of the beveled edges.
After using all of these (and other tablets), I would say that most people would be happy with either Color Nook model or Kindle Fire, as long as they have not used an iPad. If you've spent much time with an iPad then the others will drive you crazy because they all seem clunky, unituitive, unresponsive, and harder on the eyes. There really is that much difference in day to day use.
Apple builds premium quality products with really great software. There is no other company making tablets with the build quality, consistent operating system, or such attention to detail. Of course, the reality is that this comes with a higher price and you have to decide how much that is worth to you. However, since Apple dropped the price of the entry level iPad 2 to $399 there is no other large screen tablet even close to the features for the price. (Not considering if you can find a special deal on a refurb or something. Apple even has some 2nd gen iPad refurbs for $349 right now.) The other companies were having a hard time competing at the higher price and the price drop has made it nearly impossible.
Thanks, Doug, for all the input. I was leaning toward getting a Kindle Fire, but hmmmmm...an iPad does sound so much better.
GuarinoMom
Member
While I do not have an iPad and cannot comment on those, I did recently purchase the Kindle Fire and I do love it! My children ages 10 and 7 love reading on it as well as playing the free games I find that have educational value (and a few that are just plain fun) For the money we spent on it I feel it was a great purchase!
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