My Kindle is effective in taking paper out of my home—and my wallet!

After a short vacation on the road with my family, I have come to the conclusion that Kindle is my new favorite gadget. Sadly, I have also found that the Kindle Store is far too easy to use, even when you are on the Interstate in some far corner of Georgia.

When the original Kindle was announced, I was skeptical of its utility and I just couldn’t see myself using one. In the year or two since it was released, I have occasionally dreamed of buying one, but balked at its steep price. The combination of a new version (Kindle 2), a price cut, and a vacation was all it took.

In short, I love it, and it is the perfect companion for a long lazy vacation. In this article, I’ll cover several of the high points as well as a few of its shortcomings.

A Display (almost) like Real Paper

As far as I’m concerned, this is the only feature that really matters. Most will agree that reading from a screen is unpleasant. I have read books on a wide variety of sub-par screens such as laptops, Palm devices, and my iPhone—they are all pretty bad. Why is this screen so special?

To be honest, you really must see one of these e-ink devices in person to fully appreciate the difference between Kindle and a netbook display. I saw my first e-ink device in a Borders book store—they had the Sony Reader on display. If you are in a Borders, you might want to see if they have any on hand. If you have any gadget-geek friends, ask around to see if one has a Kindle you can hold in your hands.

The first time you see the display, you will be surprised at its paper-like qualities.

To show this, take a look at this close-up of the screen:

• It works by reflected light, like paper. There is no backlight.
• The letters appear to be printed right on the surface—look at the text around the coins to see what I mean.
• You can read in direct sunlight with no loss in quality. Indeed, I took the photo in sunlight to show this.
• The display consumes no energy unless it is changing pages. In fact, when you put the device in sleep mode, it displays one of several images of literary figures until you wake it up again.
• The display is just as crisp at any angle:

In this image, not only do you see the effects of an amazingly thin depth of field from my lens (a bit more than I expected), but you can see that even at a very flat angle, the screen looks pretty much the same.

The only shortcomings I can think of are that it isn’t color (no big deal), and the contrast still isn’t exactly like a printed book—it’s more like the black-on-grey of a cheap newspaper.

Some may find the page-change flash annoying: when you change pages, the display flashes black for a split second in order to clear the prior page.

The Reading Experience

With a display like that, it’s hard to go wrong.

One of the main complaints of the original Kindle was that it was too easy to accidentally turn pages. They have fixed this problem, and now you can easily turn the page from either side, while avoiding accidental page turns. It feels quite natural, and the paperback-sized screen is just big enough to feel like you are really reading a book.

The device is very small, so you can carry it anywhere (please buy a cover, though). There is no longer any need to fold the newspaper fifteen times to avoid encroaching on the personal space of your fellow commuters.

Over my vacation, I read several books with ease. Amazon says that they want the Kindle to “disappear” in your hands, so as to not distract from your reading enjoyment. They have achieved this goal.

The Kindle Store

All things considered, this was the deal maker for me. The fact that I can go to the Kindle Store wherever I am and buy a new book is unbelievably cool. To sweeten the pot, Amazon allows you to download the first few chapters of any book for free. That way, you can decide before paying if the book is going to be a good read. This ability to download free samples was what sold the device for me.

For example, while we were driving through South Carolina the other day, I suddenly developed a hankering for a good first-person WWII book. After a few minutes of figuring out how to find WWII materials, I started paging through dozens of interesting possibilities and finally settled on Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II by Herbert A Werner. How neat! I was looking for yet another memoir of D-Day battles from an American author and stumbled on a German’s first-person account of his U-boat experience.

Periodicals

Amazon provides a relatively short list of newspapers and magazines that you can subscribe to, including the New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and others. There are also a few magazines to choose from (33, to be exact).

As with books, you can sample the wares before buying. You can have one 14-day subscription to any periodical for free.

I subscribed to Reader’s Digest and USA TODAY. Both of these seem to have been well adapted to the device. Every morning when I turn on my Kindle, the day’s edition of USA TODAY automatically comes down over the air.

Built-in Internet

I’ll be brutally honest here: you really don’t want to surf the net with this device. The Internet connection exists mainly as a means of connecting to the Kindle store. If you are the kind who likes surfing the ‘Net using the text-only Lynx browser, on an actual vintage VT-100 terminal over an acoustic coupler modem, then this might fit your style.

In a pinch, you can zip to Wikipedia, but don’t expect to use it to manage your eBay auctions or watch YouTube.

The image at right is a screenshot generated right from the device. Trust me—even browsing a Wikipedia article is a painful experience.

What’s Wrong with Kindle?

Any complaints I have about Kindle are minimal, bordering on nipickery, but you should know of some of the minor annoyances.

• Any navigation and pointing and clicking is clunky and slow. It really does remind me of typing on an old-school terminal over a 300 baud modem, where it was quite common to accidentally type in several characters before the computer caught up and started displaying them.
  Sometimes you move the “mouse pointer” down to an item you want to click on, but it lags and you click once too many times, and then the final button press clicks the wrong thing. I managed to accidentally buy a book this way—fortunately, Amazon provides a “I made a mistake” link.
• No touch screen. While struggling with the navigation, it is so tempting to just poke at it. At the moment, this is likely a blessing: the Sony Reader has a touch screen, at the cost of a substantially muddled display.
• The book prices are a little steep. I’m certain that the publishers are partly to blame on this, but it is hard to accept that a dead-tree edition only costs a few bucks more than an electronic edition. There are none of the losses associated with publishing, stocking, shipping, and then handling returns on these books, but they still cost almost as much.
• Come on, only 33 magazines? I know that many magazines are glossy and colorful, but I wouldn’t mind a reduced-cost version of Wired, for example.
• They don’t give you any kind of case. You are spending $300 on this fine device and the least they could do is give you a cotton slip cover!
• You can’t replace the battery. This is no big deal for me, since I am already on my second iPhone: the technology advances fast enough for me that I buy the latest gadget before the battery in the last one dies.
• They aren’t even close to reaching the full potential as a book reader, and likely won’t. Since Kindle supports DRM content, why can’t we have an online digital library where we can check out books for a week and return them? Why can’t an outfit like books24×7 allow me to download a full book to my one registered Kindle?
  Certainly, these uses would conflict with Amazon’s business model, but it is a shame to see this unused potential.

The ugly specter of Digital Rights Management

One particularly troubling concern is with the Amazon DRM model in general. On the one hand, it seems that Amazon wants you to treat the Kindle and its content as a service. You are paying a substantial sum for a service. Since there is DRM involved, you really don’t own the content in the true sense of the word. You can’t give a book to someone else. Much of the value of Kindle is derived from the permanent connection to the Kindle Store, and your online bookshelf. Unfortunately, many customers have found that when they fell out of Amazon’s good graces, by returning too many purchases, they were shown the door quite rudely and locked out of their Kindle accounts forever. It seems that Amazon would like to have their cake and eat it too; treat their product as a service, but then tell you it is useful as a standalone product once you are left out in the cold.

And who can ignore the irony of the whole 1984 debacle, where books were yanked out of customer’s Kindles as they slept?

To be sure, most Kindle customers are not recklessly returning big-screen TVs after Super Bowl Weekend and returning GPS units after their summer vacations, so the whole Amazon lockout issue is probably not a concern for most. Likewise, Amazon should have learned their lesson from 1984. Forewarned is forearmed. Make sure that you understand the risks and limitations before you dive in.

What’s Right with Kindle?

• The display is beautiful.
• The battery lasts several days, as long as you turn off wireless.
• It really does disappear in your hands, as promised.
• It will hold every book I ever plan on purchasing.
• The online store is almost perfectly implemented—it’s extremely easy to purchase new books anywhere.
• Those free samples are the best.
• The free iPhone companion app lets me see my Kindle books on my iPhone too, and it keeps my current page in sync between the devices.
• It’s Paperless!

My Conclusion

There are tons of features that I haven’t covered, such as the built-in dictionary, the “read-to-me” text-to-speech feature, and the MP3 player features. I hopefully have covered the key features that really matter for an eBook reader.

For me, the fact that I can carry a ton of books in my hand without involving dead trees is great.

If you are an avid reader, but you are not a starving college student living on ramen, order one. You will not be disappointed.