Kindle Review – Kindle 3 Review, iPad Review

The Official Kindle Blog announced the addition of Kindle Sheet Music to the Kindle Store (as did a Press Release from Novato Music Press, the sheet music company) -

Press Release: FreeHand Systems announces that its Novato Music Press catalog, consisting of over 20,000 classical, traditional and American music titles, is now available for Amazon Kindle.

Kindle Blog: Major composers such as J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are well-represented, but the collection also contains traditional songs and works from popular songwriters like Stephen Foster and George M. Cohan, along with rare, but important works by minor composers, including Bredon Hill by George Butterworth, and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha.

The sheet music will obviously be better suited to the Kindle DX (all copies of Sheet Music have an Optimized for Kindle DX tag). 

However, lets review how the Kindle 2 handles sheet music, especially now that its just $299 -

1. The default size was on the small side. My eyesight is pretty good and it was still a bit uncomfortable.
2. You can zoom into any page as every page is an image. It then becomes quite comfortable to read. 
3. As far as actual use, if your eyesight is not very good, the delay between flipping pages and the fact that you have to zoom in to get a larger size makes the Kindle 2 quite unsuited for sheet music. Just my opinion.
4. $2.39 for the 12 pages of sheet music in the Barber of Seville seems steep.
5. The Kindle DX with its larger screen would be much better suited for sheet music. Plus you get landscape mode for an even bigger font size.
6. Could not figure out whether changing font size had any impact. As every page is an image it seems the only way to increase the size is by zooming in.
7. Flipping pages takes .5 second or so. Definitely less than a second.

You can also look at some Kindle Sheet Music images on the Kindle Photo page that show what the default and zoomed in sizes look like when compared with print in a trade paperback.

The review of the kindle 2 for using sheet music would be -

1. B grade and usable if you have good eyesight.
2. Unusable otherwise. Its just not possible to flip the page (which takes .5 second or so) and also zoom the page to larger size while maintaining flow.