I heard that you can read Wikipedia on the Kindle. Could you give me an impression about that function please? Does it work? Can you read only the English language edition of Wikipedia or are the +250 other language Wikipedias also available? Is the information live or are the providing Wikipedia from a backup? Best compare the main page on the Kindle with the online one to check that. The Kindle is for reading books and news. The Wikimedia Foundation has besides Wikipedia also projects like Wikinews, Wikibooks and Wikisource. Those are not available I suppose on the Kindle? And is reading Wikipedia on the Kindle really free of charge?

When you look at the Kindle keyboard, you’ll see a button called “Search”. Click that button, enter the word or phrase you’re looking for, and you’ll get the option to search Wikipedia, the Dictionary or the Web. Choose Wikipedia, and it’ll open the Web browser, and if there’s a page that matches your search, you’ll see that page. If there isn’t an exact match, you’ll get an option to choose from pages that might match your search.

Because Kindle’s EVDO service, called Whispernet, only works in the US at this point, Kindle natively searches the English version of the Dictionary and Wikipedia. If you want to access the other 250 languages on Wikipedia, you can use the Web browser. Web access is free, although I think you’re paying a little bit for it in the Kindle’s $400 price tag. :)

Wikinews, Wikibooks and Wikisource are all available in the Web browser.

How well does the Amazon Kindle work with .txt files? I read a lot of text books from Project Gutenberg - it’s a great resource for those old classics. Also, does it read normal PDF’s okay?

Amazon’s Kindle is a first gen device.  There are some features that we will all encourage Amazon to change, and there are some exciting features that make me say “Go Amazon!”.  You can see my thoughts and full review on GeekBrief.TV #262.

You can buy eBooks from Amazon’s store on the device, and make notes within the books.  You can also transfer documents to Kindle for a fee of $0.10/attachment. It accepts these document types: Microsoft Word (.doc), HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TXT files.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with PDF files.

Here’s how the transfer works.  You send an email to a unique email address (username@kindle.com) and include the file as an attachment.  Kindle will convert the file and send it to your device.  The ten cent charge is a convenience charge only.  You don’t have to pay it.  You can send an email to username@free.kindle.com with your attachment.  Your file will be converted and sent back to the email address on your account.  You can then transfer that document via USB onto your Kindle.

To avoid spam, you specify the email addresses that can send files to the Kindle.  Anything else is blocked.  I’m impressed with the decision to give users a choice.

There are a couple DVDs I want, but they’re only available in the UK, and I live in the US. I know there are some restrictions on DVDs in different countries, but I’m not sure what they are. What will my limitations be if I buy a DVD from the UK?

DVDs are released under different “Region Codes”, which gives the studios more control over all aspects of the release, including the ability to make sure a DVD isn’t in a country before the movie is even released in theaters. Each country is assigned a region, and DVDs with one region can’t be played on a DVD player of another region. For example, the Ally McBeal DVD I bought from the UK (Region 2) won’t play on my DVD player in the US (Region 1). Here are some of the simplest options to get around this.

You have the ability to change the region on your computer up to five times. You can go ahead and change it to the region of the DVD you bought, Handbrake it, then change back to your original region. With the Ally McBeal DVDs, we went all out an put the whole series on Apple TV. The movie companies do not believe we have the right to do this, though.

The other option is to buy a Region-Free (aka All-Region) DVD player (Region 0), and in most cases it only costs a few dollars more.

Blu-ray disks are encoded with regions A, B, C. HD-DVD disks do not have region codes.