By Todd Ogasawara on November 12, 2009 3:45 AM

No More Kindle Envy: Kindle for PC Beta & Touch Screen Netbook is a Good Solution for Me

I’ve often said that I’d like to buy a Kindle ebook reader but can’t justifiy even its current $269 price given the relatively small number of novels I read on an annual basis. And, as it turns out, I find the Kindle for iPhone ebook reader good enough for reading a novel now and then using either my iPod touch or iPhone. Barnes & Nobles’ Nook ebook reader falls in the same “nice but too expensive category”. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some other alternative? As it turns out, an alternative emerged for me this week with two converging occurences.

First, Amazon released…

Kindle for PC Beta

…which lets you read Amazon Kindle ebooks on PCs running Microsoft Windows.

The second thing that happened is that my Asus Eee PC T91MT multi-touch convertible netbook arrived. Its convertible feature lets me hide the keyboard under the screen, re-orient the display to portrait mode to turn it into a color ebook reader. You can see in the photo above that I was able to download an ebook I had previously purchased for reading on my iPhone. In fact, the Kindle’s WhisperSync feature plopped me right onto the page I had last read on my iPhone. Turning a page is as simple as swiping my finger across the screen.

And, while I can’t buy an ebook from within the Kindle for PC app, the netbook is a full Windows 7 PC. So, I can simply launch a web browser, visit Amazon.com and buy a Kindle ebook.

This configuration is not perfect. You can see in the photo that the ebook page does not stretch across the width of the portrait oriented page (it does stretch across in the conventional landscape view). However, this is a perfectly acceptable page configuration for me. The T91MT’s battery is not as long-lasting as the Kindle’s. And, the T91MT is heavier than the Kindle.

On the other hand, the T91MT is a full Windows 7 PC with a real web browser and the potential use of nearly any Windows software you might need (with acknowledgement to the T91MT’s processor, memory, and drive space limitations). So, I’m quite satisfied with this solution so far.