Let’s play a word association game, Demea.
As you wish, Philo.
PHILO: Sleek.
DEMEA: iPhone. No, Kindle.
PHILO: Svelte.
DEMEA: Michelle Obama. No, Kindle.
PHILO: Communicative.
DEMEA: Gordon Brown. No, no. Kindle.
PHILO: Clear.
DEMEA: Collateralized debt obligations. No, just kidding.
Kindle.
PHILO: Energetic.
DEMEA: Lithium Polymer Battery.
PHILO: Capacious.
DEMEA: Orson Wells. No, Kindle.
PHILO: Verbose.
DEMEA: Philo. No, Barak Obama. No, Kindle.
PHILO: Perspicacious.
DEMEA: E-Books.
PHILO: Love.
DEMEA: Kindle.
Maybe not love, but I really like the
Kindle 2. As an e-book reader it’s a winner. As a web appliance, not
as good, but good enough in a pinch, and who in their right mind would buy
it as a web appliance anyway? It’s all about the footprint.
The Kindle 2 is vastly superior to the Kindle 1, with the sorts of features that makes e-book reading—considering both the experience and the device—appealing rather than odd or marginal, as it has been for a long time now. At 8" x 5.3" x .36", it is slimmer than the iPhone. At 10.2 oz. it is svelte but solid feeling. It’s new brushed aluminum back with embedded stereo speakers move it beyond the plastic look and feel of the Kindle 1. Maybe the best thing about it is the built-in EVDO modem using Sprint’s 3G high-speed wireless network, WITH NO FEES OR SERVICE CHARGES. It is truly impressive. The communications it enables between the Kindle and its mother ship (the Amazon.com web site) are known in Amazonian as “Whispernet.”
The six-inch diagonal screen (600x800 pixels at 167ppi with 16-shades of grey—up from 4 shades in the Kindle 1) is perfectly clear. Font size is selectable in the range 7-20 point fonts (10-12 is normal for a book), with adjustable gutters. Since “page” size can vary with font and gutter size, there are no such things as pages, only locations. A location number within any work on any Kindle takes you to the same point in the text. It is a much more accurate reference system than the legacy page numbering system which has been standard since Giovanni da Spira in 1470. The display is as clear as ink on paper and is not backlit, so there is no more eyestrain than there is in reading a paper edition, and probably less wrist strain, since the Kindle is lighter than most books. You will notice the screen flashes in inverse video when you press the Next or Previous Page buttons. This is the E-Ink rearranging itself on the screen. As long as you are not turning pages, the device uses no power at all, which is a distinct advantage over a laptop computer. You will also note a change in your adaptive reading habits within the first hour of using the Kindle. You quickly learn that you can read the last two or so lines on the page DURING the inverse page-turn operation, and therefore read in a completely uninterrupted manner, believe it or not. As far as text to brain goes, it is actually a little faster than reading a book and significantly faster than reading a scrolling computer screen.
Battery life is great. The sealed (meaning you can’t change it yourself but have to pay Amazon $60 to replace it—Amazon has obviously learned from Apple here) battery when fully charged (which takes about 4 hours the first time you charge it) will last a week with “Whispernet” turned off and about 2 days with it left on. I leave mine on because I am constantly moving content onto the device wirelessly, but if you do not do this frequently it is easy to turn Whispernet off with on-screen controls.
The Kindle has 2GB of internal storage, .6GB of which is used for its
operating system, leaving 1.4GB for storage of your e-books, mp3 files and
audible.com audio books. This is enough space, according to Amazon, to
store about 1,500 full-sized books. The books purchased from the Amazon
Kindle store contain digital rights management, which means they cannot be
transferred to another device or read anywhere other than on the device
itself—one of the most unfortunate things about the Kindle.
The tipping point in making the decision to purchase the Kindle for me was the new text-to-speech feature, which Amazon labels “experimental,” which means, I suppose, that they can discontinue it or otherwise modify it whenever they feel like it. Little matter. The technology used by the Kindle was developed by Nuance, Inc., makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking software, and if you have used that excellent software you know what to expect. The voice is synthetic sounding, of course, but a whole lot better than Microsoft Sam, for those of you text-to-speech veterans out there who remember Sam.
Amazon sells over 250,000 volumes at its Kindle store, and there are many other e-book outlets, some for pay. You can load non-DRMed .mobi files, the putative e-book standard, on the Kindle by transferring via the included USB cable. There are also hundreds of thousands of public domain books that are freely available—over 7,000 of which you will actually find at the Amazon Kindle store. Finally, you can transfer just about any document onto the Kindle by emailing it to one of two inbound Kindle email addresses Amazon provides you along with your purchase.
The best thing about the Kindle, the very
best, is Whispernet. In essence, it is the ability to decide that you want
to own a textual work, click a button, and have the entire work on your
device within a minute. It’s the ultimate in instant gratification. But
it’s more than this too. Amazon backs up your purchases (and free
downloads, but not your private documents) bookmarks, annotations and other
personal marginalia via Whispernet to a central location. It also saves
your place in the works you are reading, so you never have to bookmark
(though can) and never lose your place. It is even possible to sync your
(Amazon originating) content to your iPhone or iPod Touch through a
companion (free) Kindle for iPhone app. Reading on the iPod screen is no
fun because it’s too small, and the text does not reorient when you flip the
phone to landscape. But only someone waiting in a checkout line would
bother reading on the iPhone. As I said above, it’s all about the
footprint.
PHILO: How is it laid out and is it easy to use?
DEMEA:
The control key layout is intelligent and greatly improves on the layout of
Kindle 1 where it was all too easy to accidentally turn a page. Gone is the
clunky click wheel, replaced by a 5-way joy stick (called simply the
"5-way") for cursor movement (up, down, left, right) and selection (push
down on it). The Home button always takes you back to your home menu of
available content (and the Kindle always saves your place automatically in
the work you are reading). The menu button pops-up a context sensitive
menu, depending on where you are. The Back button returns to last different
control screen view, not last page read. For example, if I am on the Home
screen, I select a book and read several pages, clicking next page to
advance to each new page, and then click the Back button, I will be taken
back to the Home screen--the last control screen. Think of it as a selector
in a menu hierarchy and you will be close to the idea. The Back button
traverses back through menu functionality.
There is also a nearly full QWERTY keyboard below the screen for conducting searches, typing annotations, and entering control functions. In addition to the alpha-numeric keys there is a Shift key, an Alt key, spacebar, an Aa key, used for controlling font size and toggling on/off text-to-speech, a SYM key for selecting symbols (@,?{ and so on), a Del key (that acts like the Del key on a Mac, not a PC) and a Return/Enter key. The keys feel good, have the right responsiveness with tactile feedback, and are spaced well for reasonably efficient thumb typing. A second Shift key on the right of the keyboard would be welcome.
The power switch is located at the top of the device. To turn it on, slide it to the right and release it. It will spring back and the device powers up almost instantly. Slide it again and release and the device goes into sleep mode, where it displays famous literary figurse as screen blankers and the keyboard is locked. Slide and release again and it wakes up. Slide and hold for more than 4 seconds and it turns off.
Next to the power switch is the standard 3.5mm stereo audio jack. The Kindle 2 has rear mounted stereo speakers. The sound quality is not great, but much improved over Kindle 1 and listenable. You can load non-DRMed mp3 audio files to play music while you read—or just play music—but this is kind of a joke because who would buy a Kindle who doesn't already have a) multiple sound systems available to them at almost all times and b) an iPod? The real reason for the speakers is to play the text-to-speech. The synthetic voice (your choice, male or female) is, well, synthetic, by no means a natural human voice, but it is listenable. In all, text-to-speech is very impressive, and I find myself using it for technical "reading." The Kindle reads to me, but I can pause where I want (by simply pressing the space bar, which toggles on-off text-to-speech once it has been started), highlight and clip the text I want, and then continue listening. It saves my poor old eyes. I would never use text-to-speech to listen to fiction or interesting non-fiction, but for wading through the endless piles of textual technical baloney that comes my way it’s great and, as I say, you can capture the nuggets and export them from your Kindle for use in other media.
The other reason for the speakers, and audio out jack, is that you can place
your Audible.com audio books on the Kindle 2 and use it as your player. On
the other hand, as I said, how many people own a Kindle who do not already
own at least one iPod? Very few, I would wager, and the iPod is a more
natural platform for audible.com books than the Kindle. Let me repeat the
mantra: It's all about footprint. The iPod footprint is just too small for
extended reading of text. The Kindle footprint is just too large to be an
efficient sound device. Nevertheless, if you want to play your audible.com
books on it you can. The first time you place an audible.com book on the
Kindle you will have to register the device with Audible, but it’s easy.
Finally, you can also go to the library, rip the tracks off audio books, and
load them on the Kindle as non-DRMed mp3 tracks in the Kindle's music
folder. But this is a bit of a hassle and easier with iTunes. This method
still suffers in comparison to Audible.com books, which automatically save
your place for you. In all, as far as audio is concerned, you will like
text-to-speech, but not use it a great deal. There are better platforms for
playing music and audio books.
PHILO: What's not to like about it?
DEMEA: Well, the price, perhaps, for one thing. It retails for $359.00, without a cover, and it would be foolhardy to travel about with it without a cover, so add $29.99 for the branded Amazon leather cover—which, by the way, is very nice and worth the money. Certain types of consumers, like yourself, Philo, will acquire third-party covers for much, much more, but that's another story.
The Kindle + cover is $388.99, but that's where the expense stops. You get the Sprint WiFi service free (I have seen this estimated at $75/month) and you also get the New Oxford American Dictionary Kindle version pre-installed for word lookup (more about which below), a $34 value at Amazon (and I have seen it priced at $60 for the mobi (mobile reader format) version elsewhere). The only other related expenses are what you pay for Kindle books from the Kindle store. All New York Times best sellers are $9.99 each. Too high, in my opinion, for an e-version that cannot be redistributed, but I'm sure publishers had more to do with pricing than Amazon. Certain books are more expensive. The People's History of Christianity, Kindle edition, sells for $14.29. And very special interest Kindle editions can be nearly as expensive as their dead tree cousins. Shakespeare in Parts, Kindle edition sells for $28.80 from Amazon. Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare sells for $33.56. These are publisher decisions, however, and are bound to shift over time as the economics of e-book selling sorts itself out. A better deal are books that were best sellers and have fallen off the list. Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, goes for $7.69. Magazine subscriptions range from $1.49 per month (Time, Newsweek, Fortune), to $2.99 (The New Yorker) per month. (Don't get too excited about these prices, the magazines arrive pretty much without graphics (but yes, the New Yorker cartoons ARE included). I would rather read these in full graphic intensity on the web than on the Kindle. Blog subscriptions (yes, blog subscriptions, if you can believe it, like Slashdot, instapundit, boing boing, O'Reilly radar, etc.) are $1.99 per month. Kindle editions of newspapers are higher. The New York Times is $13.99 per month, for example.
The only accessory I have found so far that makes sense is an extra USB cable (at $14.99) so I can have one at work and one at home. If you are a cheapskate you will purchase an inexpensive dongle that converts from USB-A to micro-B. Since I typically add a lot of custom content in mobi format (more on formats later), I have needed the USB cable to perform the transfer. Any other content in the standard formats supported by Amazon is more easily transferred by emailing it to the email address mentioned below and letting Whispernet do the work.
If you are a reader of classic literature, the Kindle is heaven, because
there is a world of literature for the device that is absolutely free.
Additionally, you need not subscribe-for-pay to e-journals or blogs to get
their content onto the Kindle if you want to simply convert it yourself.
Amazon provides you with two inbound email addresses to which you can send
document attachments. The attachments are converted to the Kindle format
(an .azw file, which is just a .mobi file with special features) and can
then be added to the Kindle. Why two addresses? One address (username@kindle.com)
is for "Whispernet" wireless syncing to your Kindle--which is wonderful and
rekindles (excuse please) the magic in a familiar technology. You send the
attachment (any size attachment!) and soon it simply appears on your
Kindle. Usually very soon. Amazon says they charge a 10 cent per
transaction fee for this service, but so far they have not charged anyone.
It is currently free. The other email address (username@free.kindle.com)
converts the attachment and returns it to your registered Amazon account
email address as an .azw attachment that you can sync to your Kindle
yourself with its included USB cable. The "Manage Your Kindle" area of the
Amazon web site allows you to register as many email addresses as you like
(or an email domain) that will be permitted to send attachments for
conversion. Supported file types are .txt, Word .doc (.docx also seems to
work, but Amazon does not claim that it is supported), .html, .pdf
(experimentally and, in my experience, disappointingly), .jpg, .gif, .png,
.bmp, .mobi (the non-DRMed varieties, which you can create using a free
program like
Mobipocket Reader
or
Auto Kindle Config Manager),
and .prc. These latter two formats can be downloaded natively from some
eBook repositories. Obviously the two audio formats supported are non-DRM
.mp3 and audible.com files. To find out more about eBook formats, visit the
Project Gutenberg file format FAQ.
Note that .ePub format books can be downloaded from Gutenberg, converted to
mobi using the Mobipocket Reader mentioned above, and then transferred to
the Kindle. A simple process that results in elegantly formatted books.
PHILO: What is the reading experience like?
DEMEA: Better than reading a book. Really. Where the Kindle separates itself from the traditional book is its ability to:
a) Look up any word at will. This procedure is effortless. Simply move the cursor into the text with the 5-way. Place it next to a word and a mini-definition pops up at the bottom of the screen. If you want a full definition, with usage and etymology, press the Return key and the full definition from the New American Oxford English dictionary instantly appears on screen. I confess to reading traditional books and reaching for the Search button, only to realize there isn't one! The Kindle implements this functionality perfectly. I have read that this does away with the classical concept of a book index, which is only partially true, because some indices are very intricately and intelligently designed and you would have to be the search equivalent of the designer of such an index to get the same results from search--a problem not restricted to searching on the Kindle. For most purposes, though, this is true. You have the further very powerful advantage of being able to search across your entire Kindle library. Compare that to searching the indices manually in 100, 500, 1000 books. The Kindle wins, hands down.
b) Act as a portal to the Internet. You can also easily perform a Google search, access Wikipedia, or search the Amazon Kindle store (of course) with a simple flick of the 5-way. Typing your search term with the Kindle's keyboard is obviously a lot less efficient than using a laptop, but then again, the Kindle weighs ounces, not pounds, and fits in your pocket, not your backpack or brief case. The web browser built into the Kindle (which supports java and javascript in "Advanced mode," which I turned on immediately) is basic but adequate. Forget about graphically intense sites. They simply will not display correctly. Sites designed for mobile access, however, work well.
c) Read to you. I have already mentioned text-to-speech above, and for me technical literature is what I want read to me. For others it may be fiction or news. The slightly unsettling lack of inflection in the synthetic voice, however, is a bit unnerving, but it grows on you. As soon as news of the Kindle's text-to-speech capabilities broke, publishers started quailing and objecting that they were not selling the "audio rights" to their properties along with the text. (What, you are not allowed to read a book out loud?) Amazon responded by permitting publishers at their own discretion to disable text-to-speech in their Kindle editions. Random House did so, and has received a lot of negative feedback from consumers. I hope that consumers boycott Random House products until they reverse this ridiculous policy. After all, no one is going to mistake the Kindle text-to-speech voice for the professional productions of Audible.com. I predict no impact whatsoever on the audible book business. Those who want them will continue to purchase them. Those who don't might use the Kindle text-to-speech feature, but wouldn't have purchased the audio book anyway.
d) Annotate your work in a portable fashion. With classical books, you scribble your notes in the margin, highlight or underline text, fold down the corners of pages, and on the Kindle you can still do all these same things (though it is not as easy to type on the Kindle's keyboard as to jot in the margin of a book—if you have a pencil with you), AND, the Kindle has the advantage that your annotations are backed up at Amazon, so you cannot lose them and always have them available. Even better, your clippings are also stored on the device and can be offloaded for use elsewhere, something very useful for book reviewers, I might add.
e) Expand your grasp. This is the best way to describe the ability you have with the Kindle to quickly locate materials related to the text you are studying, and obtain them almost instantly. If I read mention of a book, and discover a Kindle version available (or one I can easily convert), I can purchase/obtain it in a couple of clicks and have it on my Kindle via "Whispernet" within a minute or two. It is the ultimate, so far, in convenience, and what's more important, lowers the barriers to research success. That being said, the library of for pay Kindle titles is still relatively small (250,000 from Amazon, many more in .mobi format from other vendors, many many more from public domain text repositories). But this will be changing over time. The next time you purchase a book at Amazon, click the little "Tell the publisher I'd like to read this book on Kindle" link, and soon the avalanche of all available titles will start.
PHILO: Yes, but it can’t be perfect. What does the Kindle need to make it better?
DEMEA: Well, here’s my wish list:
a) No DRM on purchased titles!
b) An audio record feature so that I can add audio annotations to what I am reading, along with a link that will speech-to-text convert them and send them back to the device, or at least to my email address.
c) A PDF conversion that actually works well to convert the PDF to text, which in many cases will involve effective OCR.
d) A user replaceable battery. The Kindle 1 had a $20 battery that the user could replace. The Kindle 2 requires a factory replacement, at a cost of about $60 from Amazon. I would prefer a design that would let me purchase a new battery from any vendor and replace it myself. Of course, this is how I feel about the iPod too, and unfortunately Amazon has followed Apple down this very proprietary avenue.
e) A USB interface with the same standard USB-A connectors on both ends of the cable.
f) An optional configuration that would return a longer context for search terms. The current non-optional configuration only returns two short lines, which leaves you guessing about the most appropriate hit on occasion.
g) The ability to create user defined folders and move content between them, or some other method for developing hierarchical menus to navigate the contents on your device. The Home button takes you to the first page of contents on your Kindle, but as you begin to amass content, the number of pages on the Home screen grows. Currently you can sort the contents by most recently read, by author, or by title, and you can filter by type (personal docs, subscriptions, books, all), but with numerous pages of content, you still either need to page through, or use the Search function to find the title you are looking for. How much better it would be to let the user design her own menus to access her library.
h) An even larger font size. The largest font size available now is 20pt. This is generally very adequate, and bumps up against the practical limit of how many characters can be displayed on the relatively small screen, but in some cases it would be nicer to have an even larger optional size. (A feature the Kindle has that seems to be generally unknown is the ability to change the "leading," the vertical space between lines—sometimes called “gutters”—which works nicely and at minimum yields a very book-like page. You change the leading by holding down Shift+Alt+n, where n is a number between 1 and 9).
i) Single button (an added hardware button) access to the URL bar.
j) A more convenient way to use multiple credit cards to purchase items. As it is now, you must purchase via the 1-click method, and can only have a single credit card associated with your Kindle account. You can change this on the fly, of course, but that is tedious. I would rather purchase with multiple clicks and select the credit card I wish to use. I could then easily purchase content for work, using a valid corporate account, and home, using my private credit card.
These are really quite minor issues, and may well be part of the Kindle 3
release. The other issues related to the Kindle are really more general
analog vs. digital issues which are admittedly not going to be solved any
time soon. For example, how do you share a book that you have purchased for
the Kindle once you are done with it? The answer is, you don't. Non-public
domain Kindle books are DRMed and cannot be transferred to other devices.
This means that they cannot be checked out from libraries either. It is one
of the collisions of the old publication model and its associated copyright
exceptions, and the new media. It is one that very much needs to be
addressed, because publishers are exploiting it unfairly to their advantage,
unconscionably, in my view.
This raises the larger issue of how the works published in Kindle format get transmitted over time. A proprietary DRM format provided by a private company will only be accessible as long as the technical know-how and existence of the company that created it persists. In a hundred years will my grandchildren be able to read the Kindle books I buy? Very unlikely. Many people would think this a non-issue. After all, Kindle editions are priced to be disposable, they may say. But I think this should not be our model. I think we should archive each work in a non-DRMed format that will persist over time. Just how we do this no one seems to know, but it is a solution I favor to the historian’s paradox that we will end up knowing more about early twentieth century people because their artifacts have been archived in a persistent fashion than we will about twenty-first century peoples and societies whose artifacts are transitory.
I digress, however. The bottom line is I
love my Kindle and recommend it for reading technical materials, public
domain works, and in some cases (and I have already succumbed to this)
certain lower-cost for-pay Amazon books, magazines and newspapers. The
convenience of the Kindle, and the "miracle" of Whispernet delivery, are
just too good to ignore. The larger issues raised by an all-digital content
system, however, will sooner or later have to be decided.
