About a month ago I received a
Kindle.
I honestly had been wanting one since they were first came out, but
usually on devices like this I wait for the second generation just to
let the device work out its kinks. I expected a 2nd edition
kindle
very quickly but was surprised to see that there was no announcement
(just a lot of speculation) a few months ago. I was on the fence for
awhile because
they are a bit pricey and I didn't know if I would get my money out of
one at the $400 price point. My daughter's daycare quit accepting
Amex,
which we use, so the wife and I started hunting around for a new card
with rewards that we could actually utilize. Amazon was right up our
alley since I probably spend about $50 a month there on books (both IT
and regular reading). The card was a pretty decent deal, nothing
spectacular, but it did offer a hefty $100 discount on a Kindle during
signup. Generally Kindle books are about half the cost of their
tangible brothers so with the amount of books I already pick up I
figured I would probably get this back eventually, plus the geek in my
really wanted to get my hands on an
e-paper screen, so I dove in and
picked one up. After having it for about a month I don't regret it one
bit.
I got home from work one day and the box was sitting there so I broke
it open and couldn't wait to start playing with it. First off, I
honestly think that Amazon is using the ipod for not only how they want
to run the Kindle biz model (DRM'd media on a proprietary device) but I
also see little bits of 'Apple-esqe' things within the device and how
the device is packaged. First the packaging is stellar. If you have
ever purchased an ipod you probably know how well apple designs not
only the device, but also the packaging. Usually it is just as clean
of a design for the packaging as the device itself. The Kindle is the
exact same way. The box is made of a hard cardboard (almost plaster
board) material with the 'falling letter/symbols' design embellishing
the front of the "book"/box that the Kindle is packaged in. It is VERY
well done with very clean lines with distinct simple branding. After
opening it up, I plugged it in to let it charge for the first time and
started playing around with it. I fell in love with it in one instant
because of its best feature: the screen.
The screen is amazing, I can't say enough about it. It is crystal
clear at all times. No more bending of words as they float down the
inside seam of the worn paperback I am reading. Everything is flat,
crisp, clean and the default font is great. As I have read a few book
on it now I can see that some titles look like they have slight
differentiations in the font used so I think that it might be a title
specific determination, but the one that they use of the menu is
great. One of the nicest features is that is seems so far to be
absolutely perfect for outside reading. Every year when we go to the
beach I usually spend a decent amount of time with the wife soaking up
the sun and reading. Pretty much my entire family does this and my
only annoyance is that I don't wear sunglasses all to often, so the
combination of the dark sunglasses with the reading on the page usually
makes my head hurt after an hour or so. If I remove the sunglasses I
generally can't see the book from the outside sunlight permeating in
the "atmosphere" of the page i am trying to read. The screen pretty
much negates this. Usually when I read at lunch I read in front of a
large window where the sun shines in and it does absolutely nothing to
the screen in any manner. It is almost like the screen is a solar
panel sucking in the light and just not letting it lose. It looks
absolutely great with no glare.
What I love:
The weight and feel of the device. It is a lot lighter than you think
it will be. The screen takes up the majority of the real estate on the
face of the device, but over all the device is smaller than I imaged it
and like I said previously, much lighter. One thing I really like
about it compared to a paperback is that I can comfortably sit in bed
with the kindle in the left hand and a beer in my right hand (yes.
beer. nothing else.) The device can be used very easily in just one
hand with the left hand navigation buttons for book reading. For other
functions you will need both hands, but the majority of the time I have
spent with the device is reading so it is extremely useful to be able
to read something in just one hand.
The navigation method. It is extremely different. Before I really
started researching the Kindle I just assumed it had a touch screen. It
doesn't, but I must say that the way it is designed for input it is
pretty ingenious as long as the software designers keep the software
side inputs easy to use. Basically, vertically along side of the screen
is what I would call a 'ticker tape' and at the bottom of the 'ticker
tape' is a small scroll wheel much like you would find on most mice
these days. For input you scroll the mouse wheel up and down
vertically to a place on the ticker tape in which the software
designers have specified, which you see on the right side of the screen
via marks. It is kind of like the start menu bar at the bottom of
Windows, only vertical and more integrated into the side of the
'desktop' portion of the screen real estate.
Services. The 'Other Online Services' on the device are also
great and I think greatly under-appreciated and under-noted on the
Kindle page on Amazon. There is a simplistic browser built in that
will allow you to use Wikipedia/Google/General Web (a bit handicapped
though) etc, but best of all is Amazon's Kindle Answers. You can quite
literally type
any question into the device (human readable, no specific format
needed) and 3 people (I am assuming using Mechanical Turk or some
other method) will respond to you within 10 min. I shit you not. This
is AWESOME for settling "debates" between me and the wife. We were in
bed one night and discussing the land size (sq KM) of the US vs China.
The exact question I typed into the Kindle was: "how many times larger in landmass is china compared to the us?".
Within 10 mins I got back:
Answer #1:
A: About the same (1.017x larger)
1. Russia 17,075,400 sq km.
2. Canada 9,330,970 sq km.
3. China 9,326,410 sq km.
4. United States 9,166,60 sq km.
5. Brazil 8,456,510 sq km.
6. Australia 7,617,930 sq km.
7. India 2,973,190 sq km.
Answer #2:
A: The US is actually larger than China. The total land area of the US is 3,794,066 sq mi and China is 3,704,427 sq mi.
Answer #3:
A: China is 3704427 sq mi and the U.S. is 3794066 sq mi.
You can see they vary a little bit, but getting three answers back
allows for a greater examination of the answer. I really, really,
really dig this service. I have used it a bunch to answer real
questions AND although I have not submitted them yet I have a growing
list of questions to submit to see if I can actually get a "WTF?" reply
back from the question answerer. Each answer comes with a survey
question (ie how good was this answer Great/Good/Insufficient) so I am
sure it helps Amazon in some way for some project they are working on.
The device also has a GPS built into it, I assume it isn't a true GPS
but a cellular triangulation GPS based on three local Sprint towers and
the devices signal strength. I have actually never got it to work
within our house (Sprint EVDO itself works great though for ordering
books etc) so I don't know if it is an absence of a type of service in
the area or what.
The device also allows for a SD card, I plugged a 2gig one I had into
it and now I bump up the 300meg hard drive on the device to 2 gigs. To
be honest just placing pdfs/texts etc on its default storage wouldn't
be too complicated, but with the price of SD cards so low it isn't more
than a $10 investment to expand the storage space on the device. Might
as well go for it.
The keyboard is pretty good, I am used to typing on my blackjack so the
keys are plenty big. I really think that this device will take off
with the elderly soon just because font size can be adjusted and the
type is crystal clear and downloading one title is all you need to do
for normal reading or anything up to a decent size font (instead of
trying to find large print books for the elderly separate from their
original title with regular print). I think the keyboard might be one
of the reasons it hasn't taken off though. I am sure to someone who
isn't on electronics all day the keyboard looks a bit intimidating,
especially with the slanted keys. The keyboard is fine for standard
input for myself. The keys seem spaced enough and easy to type when
searching Amazon etc.
Things I don't dig:
I do however think there are some first generation details about the
design that I personally don't like. I have poked around the net a
little bit to see what other people say about it also. Most of the
naysayers about the device generally talk about the DRM'd titles (and
in which they should) but I can't seem to find any consensus on design
flaws.
I only really have one aspect of the device that I don't like. The right hand next page buttons:
First off the device has a slant on the right side I guess to look more
"book like" I don't mind the slant IF the right hand next page button
was not where it was. On multiple occasions I have found my hand
accidentally bumping up against the right hand side of the device and
moving myself a page forward. Other times I look up from the book then
look back down only to see that my hand accidentally hit it. It
doesn't seem to be oversensitive or anything, I just think the slant
makes your hand want to push down on it while you are holding it, which
only ads to the frustration with it. I assume it was put there so that
the device felt more "book like" as a whole for left-to-right
readers. There is also a "back" button on the same side of the
device, which is placed right below the next page button. I don't find
myself hitting it that much just because of how low the placement of it
is on the device, unlike the 'Next Page' button.
The second thing I don't like about it is the obvious, you can't give
the books to friends and with Amazon's DRM in essence you are just
allowed to read the book on your device. Earlier tonight I did find a
method for downloading past purchases via the Amazon account admin, so
I guess you *could* always redownload them even if your kindle breaks
somehow. You CAN however put your own pdf's etc on the device. As I
understand it there are 2 ways to do this, one is via emailing it to
your kindle address, Amazon will take it, create a table of contents
and all that jazz then send it over the network to your kindle. I have
done this twice, one with a whitepaper on search algos and another with
a pretty large Microsoft SQL 2008 book (about 12 megs in pdf) it worked
like a charm, I emailed it to amazon and it was on my device within 2
mins (which is pretty fast considering the size of the pdf before I
sent it). Also you can just copy pdf or anything in the amz format to
the device via the USB cable, I have done this with tons of books from
Project Gutenburg and it works really well. There are a bunch of
sites out there that will allow your to download it in the Amazon
proprietary format (with formating, TOC, footnotes etc) for free also
mostly for older classics. I will post a bunch of links at the bottom
of this post for those interested.
Code books are so-so. If you are content with just the text they are
still a viable option. The Kindle's search features make it great to
look stuff up, but if you rely on the screenshots/graphics in any way I
would probably still say buy the tangible version of the book.
All in all though, it is a great device. I am flying through books now
just because I seem to be able to read faster. The Kindle selection
for Sci-fi/Fantasy could use a little work. One of the things I really
liked about the Kindle was that since I felt like since I was reading
faster that I should go back and reread some of the Fantasy classics
that I had not read in years. Unfortunately, most of these series only
have the last book in the series on the Kindle as of now (Dragonlance
Chronicles, Death Gate Cycle, Wheel of Time etc) so I was kinda bummed
about that, hopefully they will be added soon. However I did find all
of George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series on there and it was
also on sale a good bit, I paid $6 for Game of Thrones AND Clash of
Kings so am rereading them now.
One of the other things that I like about the Kindle is since it
bookmarks exactly where you left off AND allows you to leave notes etc
where you left off, I have found myself reading multiple books at a
time, so I don't mind having a bunch in my reading buffer and a bunch in
queue. I also have a subscription to Newsweek on the device, I think I
pay $1.25 a month and get the fulll text of the issue. I think with a
lot of periodicals this might suck cause you don't get to see the great
photography that accompanies the articles, but Newsweek is pretty stale
on the art, so just reading the text is fine with me. They also have a
decent selection of local newspapers (WP, NYT, LAT etc) , but I just
can't bring myself to pay for the AJC in any way.
Thus far my reading list has been an odd mix of politico and pop:
The Post American World (Zakaria)
Twilight (Twilight Saga 1) (Meyer)
Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson)
Candide (Voltaire) *
A Game of Thrones/Clash of Kings (George RR Martin)
Introduction to SQL Server 2008 (various)
in queue I have:
Essay on the Principles of Population (Malthus)
Altered Carbon (Morgan)
The Kindgom of God is Within You (Tolstoy) *
Black (Circle Trilogy Vol 1 - Dekker)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fitzgerald) *
* Project Gutenburg (aka Free)
Over all I am really happy with the purchase, I am hesitant to say it
is the way of the future of reading, but I can say for at least awhile
it is the future for MY reading. I have yet to really see an impact on
the DRM. Each title lets you download a few pages/chapter so it is
nice to see what you might be getting before you do. The DRM
definitely will be an encumbrance at some point, it just has not been
to me yet. As of now I really love this device.
Interesting Kindle Links:
ManyBooks
Project Gutenberg
FeedBooks
Kindle GPS
Hacking The Kindle - Foolign with Kernel
UPDATE (Sat Oct 4th 10:30 AM): It looks like there actually are some shots of some kind of Kindle 2 floating around this morning. You can see them here. Just by looking at them a couple of things from my above article strikes me. #1 slanted keys are gone and replaced with round buttons. #2 the horrible "slant" and next/previous page are gone (Yeah!) and replaced by their mirror buttons on the right side. I would not know if they helped with the accidental page turns or not that I talked about in my post until I read a few books, but it looks like they *probably* would. I am confused by the input device. There does not seem to be a "ticker tape" as on v1, so I assume that the up/down contols must modify some real estate on the actual screen itself? Not to sure.
Regardless, I checked my logs and I have had 6 visits from folks at Amazon to this article, so if someone is out there reading this you are more than welcome to send me a prototype for testing :)
