WARNING: this is a tutorial on getting a Kindle (particularly a Kindle DX) to work in the UK, but it has a discursive beginning. There are other articles on this, notably Nerd Girl's, but I hope this is an up-date and it is certainly flawless as at the time of writing.

I love reading. Somehow 30 minutes spent reading is infinitely more relaxing than 30 minutes spent in front of the TV, particularly if it can be done in the bath when alone and free from disturbance. (This may be internal relaxation snobbery: I seem to give myself plaudits for reading but debits for submitting to TV.)

But the issue with reading is that I am often not sure what sort of mood I'm in, and therefore what I want to read. Usual challenge, circa 2001: pick up heavy historical tome, say that I am 7/10ths interested in London: The Biography - i.e. it's an improving read but heavy-going at times and not likely to satisfy a quick 10 minutes before bed. Find that the sheer weight of it is physically more than I want right now, and the intellectual commitment is equally weighty. Switch to reading Evo magazine and fall asleep somewhat unfulfilled.

Nowadays this doesn't need to happen. Picture this: head to bed, reach for the slim, light-weight tablet on the bedside table, ignore the somewhat hideous B&W of Agatha Christie as the screen-saver, flick on the switch and head to "Home". And here's the good bit... choose something from the Library - here's my current library by way of illustration:

1. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin. A fascinating book on Abraham Lincoln's ability to work with his greatest rivals, to extract the best and be the greater whole for all their parts.

2. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely. Should be up there with Malcolm Gladwell's best works (The Tipping Point, IMHO) & far better than other rock-star economist tomes such as The Black Swan. A very good insight into why humans do not make perfectly rational decisions and, by extension, one of the best reasons why investment manager's "perfect market" theories are tosh.

3. Waiter Rant - The Waiter (Steve Dublanica). Light-hearted melange of Kitchen Confidential and Hotel Babylon. Reads like an extended Vanity Fair article but entertaining. Low on the intellectual commitment scale.

4. The War Within: A Secret Whitehouse History 2006-2008 - Bob Woodward. The next stage in his frustratingly (but commendably) even-handed examination of the disastrous George Bush Jr administration and the post-war occupation of Iraq.

5. The Digital Photography Book, Volume 1 - Scott Kelby. Furthering my interest in mastering the techniques and opportunities of digital SLR photography. A great reference book with some outstandingly weak humour.

6. Various issues of the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Technology Review. The Kindle's handling of periodicals is, again IMHO, very strong with a good ability to jump from section to section and browse articles before diving in to read them.

7. Various PDFs that I have been emailed but have not had a chance to read - mainly notes from investment managers or AV product announcements. (This PDF handling is a Kindle DX-only feature and is very useful.)

So, in a nutshell I have the entertaining & thought-provoking (Predictably Irrational), the historically enlightening (Team of Rivals), the relevant and cautionary (War Within), the practical (Digital Photography), the trashy (Waiter Rant) and then the morceaux for education & interest. Pretty much any mood can be catered for!

The screen is clear, the battery life is extraordinary (especially as there is no point having Amazon's wireless connection, WhisperNet, turned on because it doesn't work in the UK), the weight is easily manageable and the ergonomics are excellent.

So, how do you get one?

I turned to the excellent MyUS.com - sign up for an account and then, using their personal shopper service, purchase a Kindle from Amazon.com. I had to wait 6 weeks before Amazon shipped mine to MyUS but this would have still been the case if I had been in Kalamazoo, Michigan as they have a backlog of orders (at the moment).

When it was finally sent to MyUS.com they told me in an email that it would be shipped straight out to my UK address and they helpfully provide all the necessary tracking details so you can feverishly watch it leave the depot and hop from plane to truck, to truck to truck on its way to you.

At this moment (or before) you need to get yourself some Amazon.com funds with which to purchase things to put on the Kindle (presuming that you actually want to read books rather than just PDFs which you could put on it straight from your computer). I got in touch with a couple of people living in the States and asked them if they would be kind enough to buy me a $200 gift card from Amazon.com and email me the code. I then paid them immediately via PayPal so that they received their $200 back within hours.

NOTE: Amazon will not let you buy an Amazon.co.uk (or other international Amazon site) gift card and use it in the US store.

I then created a new Amazon account and charged it up with $400 from the gift cards, by entering those gift card codes which redeems them into your account - it will ask you for a US address during this stage and you can use anything you wish. I tend to go with the monkey house at Central Park Zoo, NY, just for kicks.

When the Kindle arrived the first surprise, when I opened the packaging, is that the screen had a picture of a woman on it - a head & shoulders portrait in greyscale. I immediately looked for the little tab of plastic that would allow me to pull this "demo shot" off the screen but in actual fact there isn't one. Because the Kindle only uses battery power to change the screen and redraw the text (or image) once it is on there it stays with no extra effort. As such it ships in an "off" state but the screen stays with the picture on it - this is weird but cool and I still get a kick out of seeing some random author's face staring back from a Kindle I haven't touched in 2 days.

To begin to use the Kindle you need to associate it with an Amazon account. In the States this is simply done by turning the wireless on and inputting your Amazon user email & password which then transmits automatically to Amazon and all is done. (This wireless connection, called WhisperNet, is a fairly remarkable feature of the US Kindles insofar as you pay once for the machine and the lifetime wireless subscription comes bundled in. You can do all sorts of cool things with this connection, not least have a periodical to which you subscribe, say the FT or Wall Street Journal, automatically delivered wirelessly to your device in the middle of the night so that it is there ready for you at breakfast - which is like having a paper boy who will follow you from home in Des Moines to your office hotel in Anchourage with your personal newspapers. But no such luck in the UK.)

Without WhisperNet you have to go to your Amazon.com account and the Manage My Kindle (MMK) page and here you can put in the serial number of your device. I found that Amazon had automatically registered the Kindle to the account through which it was purchased, which in my case was MyUS'. So I had to send them a quick email asking them to de-register it (a simple thing on their Manage My Kindle page) and I was then free to put it on mine.

From here I went straight to the Kindle store section of Amazon.com and started buying books. When you have gift card credit all purchases automatically come out of this so there is no need to worry about Amazon asking for US credit card details.

So the final stage is that when you have made a book purchase you need to get the item onto the Kindle itself (this would be done via WhisperNet instantly in the US). Again, on the MMK page go to the purchases section at the bottom and alongside each book choose Computer from the "Download/Send to..." menu. This will download the book and the next time you plug in your Kindle you can drag it into the Books section of the mounted Kindle disk. This is the method they use to allow a travelling American Kindle owner the ability to get more books or other periodicals on their Kindle when they are abroad so this pathway is not likely to get closed down and should remain perfectly valid for the future.

With regard to charging your Kindle you can abandon the dinky US-style wall-adaptor and just plug the micro-USB-to-USB connector into your computer. This will both charge the Kindle and mount the internal storage for transference of content. Given the amazing battery life this only needs to be done once a week or less so charging is totally hassle-free.

In order to further streamline the process I set up an automatic script in ChronoSync (a Mac backup and duplication utility) that runs when it detects the Kindle drive has mounted. This copies the contents of a folder in my Home directory (called Kindle for sake of ease) onto the mounted Kindle storage. As such I can save emailed PDFs to my Home Directory Kindle folder and know that with no extra effort they will be moved to my Kindle when I plug it in. As a further refinement I have Hazel running on my Mac (a little file handling utility) which watches my Downloads folder for items with the extension .azw which are Amazon books. When one appears it automatically moves it from Downloads to my Kindle folder in the Home Directory ready to be swept onto the Kindle proper when the next connection occurs. (You could do much the same with Automator and a Folder Action script rather than using Hazel.)

And then you can get stuck into a whole new world of reading.

CONCLUSION

PROs: portability of a library of choice; big, clear screen (DX); PDF support (DX); it's the future of reading for education (if not for interior decoration)

CONs: no WhsiperNet so no automatic delivery of periodicals; can't subscribe to periodicals with a gift card (needs US credit card) so can purchase only on an issue-by-issue bases; some PDF page handling is confused with page breaks repeatedly in the middle of the screen