It wasn't designed for this, and some of its behaviour is not ideal, but it's working a lot better than I expected. I'm finding it much nicer than using my computer, or even iPod + printout.
The sound quality from the built-in speaker is good enough. I really like having everything there in the one device so I can just pick it up and start, and also not needing to wear headphones.
The audio controls are very limited: Alt-Space for play/pause and Alt-F to go to the next track. The lack of rewind was annoying at first, but I got used to not worrying about it. If I get lost, I look ahead in the text until it matches up again. If I get really lost, I can skip to the next track.
When I play the audio after waking the device from sleep, it resumes from the start of the track it was previously on. (It did this quite a few times before I understood what it was doing.) So I got into the habit of stopping just after it moves to a new track.
Because of the limited controls, I'm loading about 10-20 mp3 files onto it at a time, of a few minutes each. At the moment, I go through the audio sequence three times, reading Japanese text, then English text, then Japanese text again. So that's a few hours of use before it needs new mp3 files loading.
I experimented a bit with trying to make parallel text with columns, but there really isn't room. Alternate paragraphs are possible but I found them annoying. Separate texts seem to be working fine for me at this stage.
For plain text, Amazon says, "Loading TXT files containing non-Latin characters over USB is currently not supported as some characters may not display properly." But in practice it seems to be displaying UTF-8 text files without any problems.
For nicer Japanese text, this looks like it might be useful. (I've not tried it yet.)
http://www.japannewbie.com/2010/10/02/ho...my-kindle/
The sound quality from the built-in speaker is good enough. I really like having everything there in the one device so I can just pick it up and start, and also not needing to wear headphones.
The audio controls are very limited: Alt-Space for play/pause and Alt-F to go to the next track. The lack of rewind was annoying at first, but I got used to not worrying about it. If I get lost, I look ahead in the text until it matches up again. If I get really lost, I can skip to the next track.
When I play the audio after waking the device from sleep, it resumes from the start of the track it was previously on. (It did this quite a few times before I understood what it was doing.) So I got into the habit of stopping just after it moves to a new track.
Because of the limited controls, I'm loading about 10-20 mp3 files onto it at a time, of a few minutes each. At the moment, I go through the audio sequence three times, reading Japanese text, then English text, then Japanese text again. So that's a few hours of use before it needs new mp3 files loading.
I experimented a bit with trying to make parallel text with columns, but there really isn't room. Alternate paragraphs are possible but I found them annoying. Separate texts seem to be working fine for me at this stage.
For plain text, Amazon says, "Loading TXT files containing non-Latin characters over USB is currently not supported as some characters may not display properly." But in practice it seems to be displaying UTF-8 text files without any problems.
For nicer Japanese text, this looks like it might be useful. (I've not tried it yet.)
http://www.japannewbie.com/2010/10/02/ho...my-kindle/