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I am wondering if a Kindle or Kindle Fire would be of any use to my 87 yr old very non-tech mother.
She likes to read but is finding books bulky and heavy. She has no wi-fi or anything like that.
I live 400 miles away and my sister lives around 60. She gets over there once or twice a month.
My first question is re dowload.
So if I were to get her one - could I load books for her remotely?
Then additionally could my sister download stuff at her house with no wi-fi?
Second question
What is the content like? She actually likes to read Readers Digest condensed books as well as old no sex, no feminists, etc. etc. mysteries. Its actually hard to predict what she will like so buying a bunch of stuff would be sort of prohibitive.
She also reads Russian and German so old classics in those languages would be good.
Is there much cheap content that might suit her?
Three
It would have to be REALLY simple for her to use. REALLY REALLY simple.
The Kindle would be a great choice. I just bought my non-tech mom the Kindle. I have the Kindle Fire, which I prefer, but she did not like it. Actually, she said 'it's more than I need', so I bought her the Kindle. She loves!!
Oh...and she loads the books, easily.
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If you get a Kindle with 3g and register the Kindle on your Amazon account (you can name it Mom's Kindle) you can purchase books and send them to her Kindle. You will have to tell her to turn on her 3g to receive the books. I have my 80 yo MIL's Kindle registered on my account and do this all the time..
There is plenty of free content available. A site called EReaderIQ has a daily email you can sign up for with daily free books. You can also search Amazon for free or $.99 books.
Last edited by maggie2101; 05-04-2012 at 05:45 PM..
Reason: To add:
I'd caution, though, that the free books vary widely and wildly in quality. Some of them are classic books for which the copyright has expired (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc etc) - these can vary in quality because of how they were transferred to a digital format. Some of them went straight through an OCR without any quality check or were apparently coded by monkeys, given all the pagination mistakes.
Many of the free or low cost books are self-published - some of them are great, some of them are good, some of them are okay but in need of a good editing and many of them are just flat-out awful.
The "read a sample" feature is your best friend in the above cases.
I bought my Mom a Kindle, and just tied it to my own account, so I choose books for her, and just trade books from the two Kindles back and forth. So I have two Kindles on my account. My Mom could not handle anything beyond..."this is your new Kindle, turn it on...there are the books"....
I appreciate the responses but I still have a couple of questions from my OP I'm hoping someone can answer
Can I download books to her Kindle? Would she have an account that I logged into? Or should I have the account and she or my sister download from?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Whatever account you register the Kindle to, as long as you have the password, you can access it and buy books. When purchased, books will be sent to the default device - if her Kindle is the only device registered to the account, it will be the default device. If there's more devices, you can choose which ones to send it to with a drop down box.
Quote:
Is there cheap content? Free content?
There's tons of cheap and free content but whether it will be books which interest her is not something I can answer - you say yourself it's hard to predict what she'll like.
You can browse free books here: Free Books for Your Kindle | eReaderIQ.com - and using the advanced search feature on there, you can also bring up search results for cheap books. For example, here's all mysteries, excluding public domain, which are in the $1.99 to $3.99 price range, in order of popularity (I excluded $0.99 books because they are often novellas or short stories): Amazon.com: 199-399 - Mystery / Mystery & Thrillers: Kindle Store
As you can see, there's more than 3,000 options. Most people find the problem is trying to narrow down all the options, not that there isn't enough content.
I have a Kindle Touch and think it would be simple enough for a non-tech senior to use. You might have to help get it set up for her but then she should be fine on her own. The "page turning" doesn't require any dexterity so if she has arthritis that would be easy. Additionally, you can increase the font so it essentially becomes a large print reader. I agree that the e-ink would be much easier on her elderly eyes.
I would buy a sturdy, rubbery case so that it is easy for her to grip and won't slide off her lap.
Cool idea!
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