We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more.

Finally some decent quality books on poker will be available for the Kindle. These two books by David Sklansky are must reads for any student of poker.

However, since I’m taking some classes at the local community college, I do have access to their journal resources. I decided to check out what’s available at the library. When I got there, I started by searching for some of the articles I had found before, ones which only had the abstract available publicly. When I brought of the article on the screen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could read the whole thing online. Apparently if I access the article directly from these computers, I don’t need a subscription.

Next I noticed that the article was a bit long and I only had a few minutes before I needed to leave. I considered printing the article and then I remembered that if you send HTML documents to your Kindle email address, the document will be sent to your Kindle for only $0.10, a lot less than printing it out on paper.

I was very excited as the first few papers showed up on my Kindle only a few minutes after I had emailed them to be processed. I’m guessing that I’ll be doing this quite frequently in the future. If I have a document that I need to bring with me, I’ll send it to my Kindle instead of printing it.

Many of my favorite poker books are from Two Plus Two Publishing and none of them are available yet. Judging from this thread on their forums, they have no plans to release Kindle versions of their books. That’s a shame.

So what is available for the Kindle now? Well there are several books by Phil Helmuth. They all look like crap honestly. I don’t particularly like him anyway, but more importantly, I did once buy his book, “Play Poker Like the Pros” and returned it within a few hours. I just couldn’t read it and from what I did read, it was very light on useful advice.

There is one book that has his name on it that I started to read last winter, Phil Hellmuth Presents Read ‘Em and Reap. Thankfully, this was not written by Helmuth. It was better written and seemed much more useful. I’m considering buying it for my Kindle, since I don’t own a copy. Perhaps, I’ll download a sample and take a another look.

Phil Gordon’s book simply called Poker has good reviews, but it also looks very short on the kind of in depth strategy and tactics suggestions I enjoy.

Matt Lessinger’s The Book of Bluffs also looks promising but the reviews are decidedly mixed. I’ll have to find out more before I buy it.

There are a couple of non-fiction books about poker that I’ve read and enjoyed that are available. Poker Nation is a great read and Positively Fifth Street is also interesting. Lastly, One of a Kind, the story of Stu Ungar rise and fall in the poker world looks like it could be good. I’m downloading the sample of it and of Moneymaker. I’ll let you know if they are good.

I can’t be the only poker geek out there that would love to have copies of all my favorite poker books. The current lack of titles (only 36 show up when you search the Kindle store for ‘poker’) is probably an opportunity for some secondary poker authors to get noticed. If you are one of them, plead with your publisher to release your book in that format. I hope that Two Plus Two will come around soon as well, but I fear that they just don’t get it yet. If they wait too long, they might find another publisher will come along and challenge their lead in the poker books market.

UPDATE 3/22: Both the Moneymaker book and the book on Stu Ungar looked interesting. I downloaded the Ungar book and will have a review later.

I couldn’t wait to open it up.

It’s packaging looks a bit like a book.

Just turn it on, it’s ready to go.

The manual is loaded right onto the device and ready to read. It also had a number of samples already downloaded and ready to read which I had chosen from Amazon.com

The screen is hard to describe. It looks great. The pixels are tiny, it compares well to a printed page of text. And the screen saver images that appear when you shut it off are pretty neat too.

My first impressions are very positive. Two negative things:

1. The faux leather case is embarrassingly bad. It works fine when it’s closed and in transit, but it fits the device more like a flip flop fits a foot then a glove fits a hand.
2. The side buttons are easy to hit on accident.

Both of these problems have been well documented. I’m guessing that future models will address this.

However, so far the rest is great. I love the feel of it. The screen is excellent for reading. and I love not messing with a book binding to read. It rests in my lap and I just press a button to switch pages. Perfect.

I would write about it more, but I’m eager to finish reading the sample pages from Good Calories, Bad Calories.