 The Cooler Master Glacier 240L CPU cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler. Click now to learn more. So I must be the only person on earth who had never really used a Kindle before I bought this one. Consider this a review not from a seasoned ebook reader's perspective, but rather from someone who has mostly relied on dead trees for the enjoyment of novels in the past. Yes, I am just old-fashioned like that, I guess. The first thing I noticed about the Kindle was the guaranteed or certified frustration-free packaging. I laughed and then opened it up. Inside I found a charging cable, but no wall wart, a quick start guide, which I didn't really need because the thing only has one button and the quick start guide basically says push the button, and the paperweight itself. Basic specs wise, it's got a 6-inch e-paper display with a 212 pixels per inch density, 16 levels of grayscale for maps and illustrations, and a blue-tinted brightness-adjustable backlight. It's got 2 gigs of storage for up to 1,100 books plus free cloud storage of books on Amazon if you actually have more than that. And Amazon figures it'll do about 28 hours of continuous battery life, but with my low backlight preference and slow reading, I actually got more out of it than that. So let's start with the screen. E-paper is really, really cool. The screensaver on it, which stays on at all times, remember, it doesn't take power to maintain an image only to change it, actually looked like a sticker that was over top of the screen, and I initially tried to peel it off before realizing what a dunce I was being and turning the thing on. The screen does still have a bit of a yellow cast, but it's much better than other e-paper devices that I've seen and really is more white. When it came to benchmarking, I don't know, Amazon says it's faster than the old one or something, I don't know. I still couldn't type my wireless password at full speed, so I figured what is there to do with this thing other than read some books and see if the actual speed bothers me or doesn't bother me. The quick start guide made it easy to get started. Within about eight minutes, it had walked me through all the functionality I needed, connected me to my Wi-Fi, and I had purchased a book. I decided to skip the whole Facebook and Twitter integration thing, though, so maybe that would have taken a bit more time. And then, of course, you can't benchmark without comparative testing, so I read The Hobbit on my iPad 2 to cleanse myself of that second movie. I read I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell on paper, followed by the first book and about a third or so of the second one of A Song of Fire and Ice on the Kindle. The higher display density contrasts sharply with other e-readers and significantly reduced my eyestrain compared to my iPad 2. I see well close-up, so smaller font sizes with fewer page flips is more comfortable for me as long as the resolution is high enough that the text doesn't look distorted. And I found the pixels weren't very noticeable to me unless I was closer than about four inches. Speaking of page flips, one thing that drove me crazy was that referring back to things like maps or family trees in a fantasy novel like I was reading was nearly impossible and very flow-breaking compared to being able to keep my pinky in the appropriate appendix for quick reference or my thumb. I'm willing to trade my appendices, however, not my appendix, my appendices, for the quick dictionary feature, on the other hand, that lets you look things up either in the dictionary or on Wikipedia and have it defined for you. That is extremely handy. The backlight was also super convenient. I found on a setting of about four or five, I couldn't tell it was on with the bedside lamp on in my bedroom, but when I ventured into the darkened house to retrieve a reading snack the setting was perfect for that as well, so I actually never really adjusted it. Now, Amazon touts this as optimal for reading with one hand, but I call bollocks on that. It can be as light as it wants to be, but it's not balanced. In portrait, the bezel is so narrow. In fact, if you look at the picture on Amazon's website, no one can hold it like that. They've got the thumb like way off to the side here. The bezel is so narrow that you couldn't hope to actually use it that way unless you're also resting it on your lap or bed or something. And for right-handed folks, this was really frustrating. The only way it works in landscape mode, here we go, is this way with the narrower side in your right hand. Most people are right-handed Amazon. It is great for the lefties. They have that nice big bezel that I could actually legitimately call suitable for one-handed reading, but until Amazon gives you the option to go either way with landscape mode, I can't really let that one go. I mean, I know a book is heavier, but the thing about it is that it's also inherently balanced unless you're just starting out or just finishing it up. So I guess that's it. It's not the most complete review I've ever done, but the conclusion isn't likely to change with more experience with the product. So while it doesn't compare to holding a book for me, and I think it's the biggest scam ever, that e-books cost the same as physical books, given their digital distribution cost savings and the fact that they don't let people lend them more than once for 14 days, which is ridiculous, I'll still probably be continuing to buy books on Kindle rather than paper. Your mileage may vary, but the space savings and convenience of only having one device to keep track of outweighs the superior experience of the smell of paper and turning actual pages for me. Thank you for checking out this video on the Kindle Paperwhite 2013 edition. Don't forget to like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment, let me know. Books or e-books, which do you prefer? And as always guys, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.