Can It Kindle the Imagination?
We read the fine print on Amazon's new gadget.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the Kindle may be the most important thing he's ever done. But how well does it work? As the first journalist to get his hands on the device, I found it fit my hands pretty well. It's comfortable to hold, and the huge NEXT PAGE and PREVIOUS PAGE buttons on the sides make it easy to keep reading at a steady pace. On the other hand, the prominence of those buttons makes it almost impossible to pick the Kindle up without inadvertently turning a virtual page.
Navigation through the various features is via a novel system centered on a clickable "select wheel" that moves a silvery cursor up or down a slim bar, like an elevator moving through a shaft. It's dead simple to master, but a little slow.
The real acid test was whether the Kindle was capable of transporting a reader into that trancelike zone where the world falls away. My suspicion, since I've had a Sony Reader (which uses the identical E Ink technology), was that it would, and I was right. I read a Dan Silva thriller, Richard Russo's new novel and Eric Clapton's unsatisfying memoir, and didn't feel I was missing anything that I would have gotten in a "real" book.
It's also exciting to get a daily dose of The New York Times and other papers. But the interface for newspaper reading is disappointing—you have to painstakingly go through article lists, and often the stories are insufficiently described. Still, getting the Times in one burst on a daily basis, no matter where you are, is closer to getting a hard-copy delivery than picking out articles on the Web, and it costs $13.99 a month, compared with the $50-plus I pay for home delivery. Do the math.
The real innovation of the Kindle is connecting by its wireless Whispernet, which works well from pretty much everywhere. When you go to the Kindle store, you are greeted like an old friend, since your Kindle account is linked to your Amazon buying history and recommendations. Not every book I wanted was there (paging Philip Roth), but plenty were, and the $9.99 price for best sellers and new books makes purchases more attractive. The coolest thing you can do with a Kindle, hands down, is buying a book—just click BUY and, bang, you have the book in less than a minute.
Though the copy protection doesn't affect book-reading, it is limiting, and annoying. You can't print out a passage, e-mail it to a friend or copy it into a document. You can't lend a book to someone, or sell it after you're finished.
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Member Comments
Posted By: apetra @ 12/13/2007 11:50:00 AM
Comment: I've accumulated an 850 page library from Project Gutenberg, at least 250 of which are on any serious "Great Books" or "Must Read in Your Lifetime" list. I've rebuilt and exceeded my personal collection (give away years ago during a move) of classical literature, poetry, philosophy and original historical sources. And I have already pulled down first chapters of about 50 books available for the Kindle using its free "try before you buy" sample system. I've held the Kindle, and I placed my hand *underneath it* to cradle it, like I would a book, I didn't grab it from both edges squeezing hard and hold it up to face level (sheesh). A few accidental page turns? OK, well I have severe arm and wrist pain from repetitive stress, and the huge buttons are a dream -- turning pages on the Sony book reader is physically painful by contrast. I plan to leave the wireless off much of the time, or to suspend the unit (easy two-key combination), which extends battery life with active use to over a week.
Posted By: Mandrake9 @ 12/13/2007 11:24:10 AM
Comment: I think the cliche he's groping for is "voracious," not "voluminous" reader. And surely he's wrong in any case. The voracious reader -- more than five books a week -- is not buying them at ten bucks a pop, unless he or she is very well off and a spendthrift even then. You can buy anywhere from one to four hundred good used books for the price of an empty Kindle, perhaps a year's worth of reading, many of which can be traded back in, and that's what real readers will be more tempted to do. The Kindle hoopla seems a little baffling when you consider that the device fails to address the two disadvantages that have doomed all previous gizmos of its kind: expense and inconvenience. At least, that's how it looks to those of us who are a) actually voluminous, i.e., fat enough to be able to carry fairly hefty paperbacks in our pockets, or b) who long since learned how get a dozen free classics from Project Gutenberg into the Palm PDA we can also fit into a pocket. (And once you have more than two or three books on your person, the ability to get more wirelessly instead of at home doesn't seem worth whatever large percentage of the Kindle's price it represents.) Those who think they can't get used to reading a book on a Palm probably haven't tried very hard, or are using the wrong document reader -- but I can readily believe that the latest digital ink technology is far better. That's the only selling point I can see, though, except to the person with small or no pockets, for whom a regular book is perhaps as inconvenient as a Kindle. (Perhaps. The kindle may be smaller than some trade paperbacks, but it has to be a heckuva lot more breakable.) So far, I just don't get it. I can believe that the gimmick-happy will have to own them, but I don't see the appeal to the average big reader.
Posted By: BMJMiller @ 12/13/2007 10:50:19 AM
Comment: Sorry for the double post--I had to get an account to post, and I thought it had erased my first post.