Reading Kindle On the iPod Touch

Earlier this year I purchased an iPod Touch, primarily for use as an ereader.

Since then, I have purchased one Kindle book for the machine (Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart Ehrman, which I highly recommend), and I’m thrilled with the way Kindle reads on my Touch. (By contrast, while FileMagnet works fine for pdfs, it does not allow fond adjustments with html. That is, you can make the type bigger, but the lines don’t wrap. I resorted to inserting an html font command into an html file, which is a clumsy way to address the problem.)

I got an unexpected benefit with the Touch: I can take notes with the Notes application as I read. All I have to do is toggle between the Kindle app and the Notes app. Then I record the Kindle locator and some brief notes. Once I find a hot spot, I can cut and past the contents of a Note into email (I use my wife’s hotmail account because it’s easy to access), then send myself the notes.

In fact, this works so well that I might start taking notes on my Touch even when I read paper-and-ink books. True, the keypad is irritatingly small, and I struggle to peck out a message. But the alternative is either to take notes by hand, which I would then need to digitize to make them fully functional, or try to use a full-size keyboard, which is impractical when reading a book. So, as much as I didn’t expect it, the Touch wins out as a note-taker while reading.