They're Here!

Finally, our Kindles arrived via FedEx today. We pre-ordered the new Kindle 2s back in mid February and they were shipped out rather quickly. Kathy boxed our Kindles and 2 Kindle covers up for us and sent them via Fedex on a Thursday. They arrived in Shenzhen, China the following Tuesday (pretty quick!); however they were held up in customs because they did not know what a "Kindle" was. Turns out, not many people do.

Here is the page for Amazon's Kindle. Half way down the page, it'll give you a 6 minute video on what the Kindle can do.

It took another week and 20 emails to get them through customs and we ended up having to pay a customs duty tax on them because Honest Abe (me) decided to tell them their actual worth. I thought at the time that telling them truth might get them to expedite the process. Nope! They said it'll be another 5 days as the they go through the "3 levels of customs approval." That is China in a nutshell.

They were release from customs on Monday and attempted delivery today; however I didn't have the money waiting on the Fedex guy, so I had to call and have them come by again. Thank goodness the whole process is over. I'm hoping never to have to mail something to China again.

As for the Kindles, they appear to be worth the hassle and process, but time will tell. I just downloaded my first book, Divine Justice by David Baldacci. Jamie has pledged to not download any for a while until she works more on her dissertation. We'll see how she does. I told her not to worry about it and enjoy our new toys.

In the U.S., Kindles are practically idiot proof and buying things wirelessly (through a cell phone signal and not wi-fi) is very easy. You can simply surf through 1000s of books and click and buy. Dangerous actually. You can also choose to have several major newspapers delivered to your Kindle every morning if you subscribe to them. See video above for full details.

Here in China, Jamie and I have those capabilities, but not wirelessly. We have to plug them into our computers, get online, and then buy them from amazon.com. No biggie really, just takes another 2 steps.

We are excited about vacations and not dragging around books. The Kindle comes with 2 GB of memory, so you can store 100s of books on there.

That is our update and we are excited!