Kindle Me This
Do people really want to cuddle up with a piece of technology? No, I don’t mean it like that. I’m talking about Kindle, the wireless reading device from Amazon. The prevailing wisdom is that for an e-reader to succeed, it will have to make people want to “cuddle up” with it like they do a good book.
A number of consumer product companies have taken a shot at it, and to date, haven’t been able to put together a package that appeals to general readers.
But if anyone can do it, Amazon can, right?. They have the brand, the relationships with publishers, and the infrastructure to pull it off.
So how does Kindle stack up? Here is what I found.
Availability
If if you want a Kindle, you’re going to have to wait. On the Amazon website, Jeff Bezos apologizes for the fact that people are waiting up to six weeks to get one. I fared a little better. I bought mine on February 2nd and received it on Valentines Day. Jeff, you sure know how to make a guy feel special!
The good: The device arrived charged and registered to my Amazon account. No set up. Ready to go. I suppose the only way the out-of-box experience could have been better would have been if they had pre-installed a title from my wish list.
The bad: While selling out on the first day says “hit product”, being continually out of stock four months after launch says “rookie consumer products company”. I’m sure that a number of people are waiting to take the $399 plunge to see how well Amazon supports a consumer product.
The Industrial Design
Kindle had the privilege of launching shortly after the iPhone, and unfortunately for Amazon, the iPhone raised the industrial design bar quite high.
The good: Much has been made of the fact that the Kindle is bigger than the competing reader from Sony. I think this is a benefit. When reading on your couch or in your comfy chair, the device rests comfortably on your lap or stomach. A thinner device would put more pounds per square inch on said lap or stomach, and be less comfortable.
Another plus is that Kindle is not a simple box. It has lots of angles. Not curves, gently rounded angles that fit nicely in the crook of your palm.
The bad: The Kindle industrial design has received some pointed criticism, some of it with good reason:
- When holding the device, it is very easy to inadvertently hit the Next Page button. Distressingly easy. I couldn’t find a way to hold it in my right hand without pressing either the Next Page or the Back button.
- The power switch is located on the back of the device. If you keep the device in its cover, you have to take it out to turn the machine on. Why isn’t the switch located on the top?
- The Home key (a frequently used key) is buried in the middle of the keypad.
- The page flashes when you advance to the next page. This is distracting.
- No touch interface. This isn’t Amazon’s fault, really. Apple raised the bar. Unfortunately, it is easy to imagine that Kindle would be greatly improved with a touch interface.
The Cuddle Up Factor
So can you cuddle up with Kindle?
After some experimentation, I found that I was able to balance it in one hand, thumb placed over the Amazon logo and within striking distance of the “Next Page” button, and read comfortably for several hours using less physical energy than a conventional book. I didn’t develop the almost pavlovian attachment to the Kindle that I did to the iPhone, but neither did I find the technology intruding on the reading experience. “Cuddle” may be too strong a word, but the experience was perfectly acceptable.
Conclusion
Kindle is a good (but not great) 1.0 product. The industrial design issues aside, I found the reading experience to be a reasonable replacement for paper when reading text-only books like novels or biographies. Not having stacks of books littering my reading area will be a welcome change and after using the device for about six weeks, I look forward to using it more.
And I’m looking forward to 2.0.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
It’s possible that the world is on the verge of another revolution in the saga of the written word, thanks to Amazon.com’s new e-book reading device. The Kindle debuted with a thunderclap back in the Christmas season of 2007. Within hours after the company announced the Kindle, it was sold out. Now in May it’s finally available.
I bought my Kindle back in late November of 2007 when it was first released, and I’m completely won over by it despite a few annoying flaws and despite a bad feeling in my gut about what this gadget portends for the future of the book, book stores, libraries, and the very experience of reading. More about that later.
I’m so hooked on the Kindle that I prefer reading it to a book–and for pretty good reasons. It’s more comfortable in the hand, easier on the eyes than paper. I can bookmark passages, highlight text, and make notes, which are duplicated in a separate file so they can be viewed on the Kindle or transferred to my computer. These features make the Kindle ideal for anyone doing research. The device has a built-in dictionary making it a cinch to look up words quickly without losing your place in the text.
The dictionary is a big deal for me. I own five paper dictionaries strategically placed by my computer desk, my hand-writing desk, my couch, my Dartmouth office, everywhere I read. I love to look up words even if I know the meaning; I want the fine distinctions, the history of the word. But it’s an annoyance to have to have put the book down, dig out the dictionary, look up the word, and return to the book. The process is so much smoother on the Kindle. You never lose your place.
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The Kindle in its black cheesy case looks like and feels in the hand a little bit like a paperback book. It reads like one, too. You open the case to a cream colored device with a light gray screen and a tiny keyboard that a primate with two opposable thumbs can operate. On the sides are bars to move to the next page, the previous page, and back to the previous book you were reading. A little clicker on the side allows you to navigate the Kindle’s table of contents.
You can get information on a computer monitor or a Blackberry or an iPhone, but the displays are hard on the eyes. Not the Kindle, which uses so-called e-ink technology. The words are as crisp as print, though only in black. There’s no color, nor back light to fatigue the eye. Reading on a Kindle is like reading on paper. You can curl up with it in bed, on an easy chair or a couch, on the beach or in a spaceship to Mars. Once you get into the flow of the narrative you forget you’re reading on an electronic device.
Amazon claims the Kindle will hold 200 books in its memory. I can’t say for sure; I haven’t got there yet. Since you can also store books on removable SD cards, a person’s library can be almost unlimited in size. In addition, everything you buy from Amazon that goes into your Kindle also stays in a special file on the company’s electronic library. That means you can kill off books in the Kindle as you reach the end of your memory limit with the knowledge that you can always retrieve them at no cost from your Amazon library.
Other e-book readers, notably one by Sony, match the Amazon product for readability, but they haven’t caught on, probably because you have to download books into your computer and then transfer them into your device. Where the Kindle stands alone–its revolutionary aspect–is how books and even the internet find their way to the device.
Each Kindle has a built-in cell phone service from Sprint that Amazon calls Whispernet. You can’t make calls with Whispernet, but you can access Amazon to download books, newspapers, and magazines directly into the unit. It takes about a minute to download a good-sized book. You can download a free sample to read to help you decided whether to buy or pass.
Bestsellers cost $9.99, but many books are much cheaper, especially classics. At the moment I’m reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Cost 99 cents. Just this morning I ran across the word nuncupative. I looked it up in my Kindle dictionary: “a will declared orally.” For me, learning that word was worth 99 cents.
Actually, you can bring the Franklin book, the complete works of Shakespeare, and other classics in your Kindle for free, but you have to download them from the internet onto your computer and then transfer them via a USB cable to the Kindle. The 99 cents pays for the convenience of downloading them directly and quickly from the Kindle itself.
Amazon’s data base of books and periodicals currently stands at about 100,000, and the company has made it clear that it intends to grow the Kindle library.
Besides books you can buy essays, short stories, magazines, and today’s newspaper, which will be downloaded in seconds. You can pay by the edition or subscribe in which case the paper will be downloaded to you automatically. It’s very satisfying to sit at the breakfast table with your Kindle beside you to read, for example, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or San Francisco Chronicle.
Another feature that makes the Kindle stand out from other ebooks is that it contains a web browser so you can cruise the internet using Whispernet. No computer needed. If you’re signed on with Google’s mobile service you can even check and compose emails. Other email services are not supported.
Whispernet was invaluable to me while I was driving across country in early February. Every day I checked Weather Underground on the Kindle. I was able to avoid an avalanche on I-90 in Washington State, a Blizzard on I-80 in California. I was one day ahead of the killer tornado in Tennessee and a 67-car pile up in a whiteout on I-84 in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. When I arrived home after five thousand miles of driving the worse driving conditions I had to face were on my street in Westleb. The Kindle got me home safe.
Because the type is so crisp it’s easier to proof-read on the Kindle than on the computer screen, so I’ve downloaded the novel I’m working on and have read it over and made notes for corrections on the computer.
The Kindle can also download and play music, and Amazon offers a service called “Ask Kindle.” You use the Whispernet to ask a question–any question–and you get a response from a real person.
The search feature allows you to find the location of any word on your Kindle, look up the spelling on the Kindle dictionary, bring it to Wikipedia, or google it.
Writers who can’t find a publisher for their works or wish to by-pass the publishing industry will love the Kindle. Amazon will contract with authors to allow them to download their writings for free into Amazon’s Kindle data base. Authors set the price for their material and Amazon returns a royalty of 35 percent of sales–pretty good deal. In book publishing, authors get anywhere from 5 percent of the retail price for paperbacks to 10 to 15 percent for hardbacks.
The Kindle does have some annoying design flaws in version 1. It’s easy to accidentally hit the bars that turn the pages. There’s a little doohickey that is supposed to hold the unit in its case. Mine broke a week after I started using the Kindle. The off and on button is on the rear of the unit, so you have to take it out of the case to turn it on or off.
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There’s a war on among Amazon’s customer reviewers that lays out the territory for the pros and cons of this device. Amazon’s star system for customer reviews goes from one to five. The Kindle, standing on its merits as a device, probably deserves a four because of the design flaws.
People who hate the Kindle give it a one. The Kindle lovers give it a five often to balance what they feel is unfair reviews by the naysayers.
Kindle haters fall into two broad categories, the techies and the book worms.
The techies object to the Kindle on aesthetic grounds. They call it a seventies retro gadget. They want it to look like an Apple product. The techies also want color, a sweeter connection to the internet, a telephone connection. The techies also object to the price of the Kindle, $399. Few of the techies have actually used a Kindle, and you get the impression that they rarely if ever curl up with a good book.
The book worms are the people who do curl up with books; they object to the Kindle because they see it as undermining the world of books as they have come love it. They talk about the smell of old books, the feel of a book in the hand, the local book store or town library as a sanctuary. For the book worms, the book as an aesthetic object is as important as the content. The Kindle poses a threat to things they hold sacred.
The book worms point out that readers love to share books. You can’t do that on a Kindle. Both technies and book worms worry about Amazon controlling the content. The paranoia goes something like this. Suppose Amazon goes out of business. There goes your library. With your content stored in cyberspace, the government or any entity with malicious intent could have access to your mind and heart through the kind of reading you do. In fact, Amazon already has this information in its data base, which it uses in its “Recommended For You” notifications. In my case, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Art of War by Sun Tzu, the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and A Collection of Jokes and Funny Stories by Marvin Lebman. Judging from the list, I come off as a Capitalistic, war-mongering smarty-pants weirdo.
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I love my Kindle, but I do have mixed feelings about what I see as the direction it’s taking the world of reading. I used to buy used books regularly from Left Bank Books in Hanover and the Hundreth Monkey Book Shop in White River. Not only did I love getting bargains on good books, and discovering books, I loved the smell and feeling in the book stores. I also enjoyed conversing with the very literate book shop owners, Corlan Johnson of Left Bank and David Holtz of Hundreth Monkey. On occasion I even bought new books as the Dartmouth Book Store, Norwich Book Store, and Borders.
I stopped buying books for the simple reason that I had no more shelf space to put them on. Meanwhile, Holtz closed his shop, Johnson sold her business to a like-minded soul, and the Dartmouth Bookstore morphed into a Barnes and Noble, kinda. The Norwich Book Store–and the magnificent women who operate it–soldier on. If you don’t mind fighting Westleb traffic, Borders beckons.
Now, since Amazon allows me to download a sample a chapter or two of any book it sells, I do most of my browsing on line. The book as object, unless it has pictures in it, no longer interests me. I’m probably not the only book lover who is undermining a world he loves, a world that shaped who he is.
No one can say what the Kindle, and probably other similar devices soon to be developed, mean for our future as writers and readers, but I believe it’s obvious that the Kindle is more than just a gadget. It’s a piece of technology that eventually will change the way people read.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Ernie,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Kindle is certainly more that just a gadget.
As a techie, I do want the device to be esthetically pleasing. This is a device I use when I want to get away from the computer. I don’t want to focus on–or even be aware of–the technology (i.e. the user interface, the mechanics of changing a page, etc…). I just want to immerse myself in a good book.
Even with the flaws I mentioned in my post, Kindle does a decent job of this–but it can certainly do better.
As a bookworm, I can see the writing on the wall. In the not too distant future, there is a very good chance that we’ll be like the railroad buffs who gather at the historical society and talk about the good old days. I can live with that.
On a side note: I lived in Hanover and West Leb in the late Eighties and some of the bookstores you mentioned weren’t around then. How are booksellers doing these days?
-Steve
February 14th, 2009 at 2:13 am
Just came across your blog on Google. Interesting post, you bring up a few good things to think about. Good luck with the blog.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:13 am
Hi there, just came across your blog doing a search on Google for Amazon Kindle Product Reviews. My personal opinion is that the Kindle really blows away the Sony Reader and all other products out there, and the Kindle 2 will be Amazing! Can’t wait for the Feb. 24th release date!!!
February 18th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Tom,
Judging from the Kindle 2 specs, Amazon has addressed most of the issues I wrote about in my post. I’ve got mine on order and will post here as soon as it arrives.
-Steve