hello, my name is Ben. I'm a 29-year-old quadriplegic (paralyzed from the chest down, all four limbs affected. I can move my arms pretty well, but I have no use of my fingers and they are contracted.) Without the use of my fingers you can imagine how difficult reading books could be, but I loved reading and I found ways. I had a surgery about two years ago on my midsection which made it impossible to tolerate the weight of heavy books, and without the use of my fingers paperbacks were not an option (they would simply fall off the book holder when I tried to turn a page.) Into my life comes the Kindle. That was back in December when I got the Kindle 1. I literally shed tears as I realized Amazon had given me back the passion that had been stripped away from me after my surgery just as my mobility had been taken away 14 years earlier. Now just a few months later we have an upgrade. I feared an upgrade with a sleeker design would be the end of its handicap accessibility. I am here today to tell anyone with disabilities nothing could be further from the truth. For those of us with poor dexterity the five way controller can be manipulated easily with a knuckle, or even the side of your hand since the controller sits just slightly above the other buttons. This for me was a major improvement accessibility wise from the first unit since trying to push the button with my knuckle would often scroll down and select the wrong thing. The five way controller also takes very little force to push, I was often afraid of breaking the Kindle 1 with how hard I had to push on the wheel with the side of my hand. I love reading the newspaper every day, but reporters love to push the boundaries of our vocabularies, but the Kindle 2 dictionary is right there to keep us reading, and make sure we know exactly what we are reading so we don't misinterpret anything. The improved dictionary lookup is amazing. I no longer have to go to a menu and look up an entire lines worth of words. I just use the controller and go to the word I want and the definition is on the bottom of the screen :-) We can now access the Internet without turning over the Kindle to flip a switch :-) you just go to the menu and turn on the wireless. I couldn't tell you how many times I wanted to look something up I was reading in the newspaper only to find out I didn't have the wireless on. Turning it on then would've required me to call my caregiver, have them turn it on, leave the room while I did my research, and then call them back to turn it off. Thank you very much for the great improvement :-) The buttons are a little smaller, but not so small that they are not accessible. I can still easily hit the buttons with the side of my hand. The only real difference is now when my caregivers put the Kindle away for me they don't accidentally turn pages, or click a button and say "I didn't mess anything up did I?" Speaking of pushing buttons I loved reading magazines on my Kindle 1, the only problem was I didn't want to read every single article, and being disabled it was just a little inconvenient to have to keep clicking the wheel to get to the menus to scroll through the magazine. So what did my good friends at Amazon do for me? Well they went and made it so if I don't like the article I'm reading I just have to push my little joystick to the left or right one time to go to another article :-) Some people miss the memory card slot. I myself did not start reading e-books until the Kindle, and I have no problem with their prices for books. Since the device can hold 1500 titles and whatever erase from the device to make room is backed up at Amazon I have no complaints in that department. Anyway if I do find other e-books I like I can simply e-mail them to my Kindle :-) Yes we have to send our Kindle to Amazon to replace the battery, being disabled this is actually a convenience for me, and there are also a lot of music devices out there that you have to do the same thing. So I will not complain about this either :-) If I knew the e-mail address for Jeff Bezos I would happily send him this review that I will also be posting in the forums so he would personally know that he has truly changed one man's life for the better, that this device for some of us will not just be incredibly convenient, but that it will be life altering. In my profile is a picture of me holding the Kindle 2 reading one of my favorite books :-) I hope the picture shows accurately how easy it is for people with disabilities to use. I just put a pillow on my midsection so the book will have something to lean against while I turn the page with my knuckle. I can offer no higher praise so with that in my review ends. Thank you...... thank you Kindle team.
Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)
By Ben C. Hobson "In chess the winner is the one who makes the second to last blunder :-)"
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