Monday, January 26, 2009

Kindle Review - Font Sizes

One of the neat things about the Kindle is that you can change font sizes. It's mentioned in many reviews, but if you're like me, most of you will play with this for a few minutes and then select a size that works well for you and never change it. For me that was spending a few days working with different fonts before I settled on #2.

For those of you without a Kindle, there's a scale from 1 to 5, one being the smallest and 5 the largest. There's a dedicated button on the front that you press, it brings up the fonts, and you select the size you want. The page reformats, which could mean you need to page backwards or forwards potentially since the device doesn't know where you were reading, but for the most part it works well.

When we were in the mountains on vacation, my wife was stuck in the condo and played with my Kindle a bit. When I picked it up, she'd set the font to #1, which is the smallest size. She didn't want to change pages that often and liked size #1. No big deal, when I picked it up, I could easily change it back.

A few days after we got back from vacation, I woke up one morning early and decided to read for a few minutes before getting up with the kids. Tia was laying on my arm and while I could reach the Kindle, I couldn't reach my glasses. No big deal, I changed the font to 4 and I could read easily, though it did mean turning pages often. Still, that would not have been easy to do with a paperback that I would have had to basically rest on my nose to see.

It's a small feature, but one that I'm sure I'll find more and more handy as I get older.

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