I have written here about the extra curricular uses of the Kindle 3G, but after a number of weeks using it I have become very enamoured of its ability to swallow documents and manuals in PDF form. Of course, I could always have (and do have) them with me on my laptop and even iPad but nothing beats having them in a device that can be held in one hand, and has a hi res screen good enough to show a whole A4 page with good comfort. With the amount of reading material with me today as I type this in my hotel room, it would have to be hundreds of kilogrammes of paper all at my fingertips.

You can send the PDFs to the Kindle for conversion via email but I don’t find that the best way (particularly with the roulette wheel of picking it up by 3G or WiFi, when you are charged for the 3G transmission). Strangely enough the best way to me is side loading the books to the device via the micro-USB cable, as this does not do any strange conversion attempts.

PDFs on the Kindle offer almost all of the capabilities of normal books – the tracking of read position being the key one, particularly with texts that are hundreds of pages long. The only downside I can see at the moment is the lack of flexibility of filing of the books and the inability to see status at a glance of the cover (the ‘new’ book status soon disappears when you open it).

This device is a real boon to the traveller.