I never really considered that this book might raise eyebrows until some years later when I was in the Navy. We had just come back from a cruise and everyone was heading out to their dormant cars to go off base. One of my shipmates was quite surprised to find police surrounding his vehicle when he reached the parking lot. It seems that a few weeks prior, some night watchman had seen two curious items in the back seat with his flashlight: the butt of a BB pistol and … The Anarchist Cookbook. He sure had some ‘splainin’ to do about that one. They were more interested in the book than the pistol.

What about today? Do we have to worry if our reading habits are known to others?

Though I chuckle at the thought that anyone would care that I have Clive Cussler in my Kindle, it’s not difficult to imagine situations where one might not want Kindle searches or eBook library contents known:

• People reading hotly political materials that might attract unwanted government attention.
• Folks who are reading materials that hint at their sexual orientation, a fact they might wish to keep private.
• Readers who are searching for materials on one of many different illnesses, that they might not want potential employers and insurers to know about.

Want to know how eBook vendors are treating your privacy? Here’s an article on the subject by Ed Bayley on the Deeplinks Blog:

An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy

This article provides a table with five key e-reader technologies—Google Books, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Sony Reader, and FBReader—and provides answers to several key privacy questions for each product.

Even if you have nothing to hide, think about this: Considering how poorly Amazon chooses recommendations for me, I wonder how poorly our government might pigeonhole me based on my book collection. One thing is certain: somewhere in that list is one ancient copy of The Anarchist Cookbook!

Soon after returning from that trip I wrote a review of my Kindle experience. Now some time has passed and I am coming back to relate the Kindle experience over time.

The novelty hasn’t worn off!

I’ll admit it: I’m a gadget geek and I’m afraid to imagine how much hard-earned income I have frittered away on pretty devices that I really don’t need and that often get tossed to the back of some gadget drawer.

My fear with the Kindle was that it would fall into this category: I would read a few books on it and then it would slowly find its way deeper under piles of other stuff—papers waiting to be scanned and guitar music that never will be learned. Eventually, it would be charged up once a year to avoid feeling guilty for not using it.

The reality is that I use the Kindle today almost as much as when it first arrived. Though my reading has not picked up nearly as much as I would like it to, whenever I do have a chance to read, I pick up the Kindle.

One thing that has remained constant: I can hold the device for hours, reading peacefully, and it still “disappears in my hands” as promised. The text is still as enjoyable and crisp.

Newspapers still aren’t for me

Many years ago the local paper would have a regular promotion where they all but gave away the paper for six months. I would try it, and then regret it as I found myself tossing unread paper after unread paper into the recycle bin. I just am not a newspaper kind of guy: As much as I like reading the paper, and I would like to be tuned in to world events and enjoying my favorite columnists, I don’t seem to ever sit down to read the paper.

One thing has become clear over the past few months: it’s just as easy for unread electronic newspapers to collect in a pile as their paper counterparts. I have a subscription to USA Today, but I might actually only read it once or twice a month. I am probably going to end up canceling that subscription. Reader’s Digest, on the other hand, makes a welcome appearance once a month and I enjoy reading it.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the usability of the Kindle came from my wife. She was telling me about some story she had started reading in Reader’s Digest at the doctor’s office, only to be interrupted by the nurse calling her. I handed her the wonder gadget and showed her how to read Reader’s Digest. She had no problem whatsoever working her way through several back issues.

My wife hates technology. She likes the Kindle.

Lame Recommendations

One area where I have been somewhat disappointed is in the recommendations from the online bookstore. I just don’t understand Amazon’s algorithm for determining which books to recommend.

It is clear that your entire Amazon book purchasing history is used, but it is not clear how.

For example, in the past several months I have purchased exactly two books by Joseph Wambaugh and two by Kurt Vonnegut. Why, then, does my recommendation list always contain these two authors in the top slots? I have bought dozens and dozens of books from Amazon, often multiple from an author. I would hope that their recommendation would be a little better than that.

One book I bought on the Kindle recently was The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I also have two by Kim Edwards, the author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. These, and several like them, though they might place my Man Card at risk, are evidence of a genre of books that I hope Amazon would detect and use to better choose my recommendations. No, I’m stuck looking at Wambaugh and Vonnegut forever I guess.

Last week I sent an order with several children’s books out west for my cousin’s three-year-old. Guess what appeared before Kurt in the list: a recommendation for a children’s book, Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

In the area of book recommendations, I have been quite disappointed.

Questionable Top Seller List

There are three lists of books provided at the home page of the store: New York Times Best Sellers, Kindle Top Sellers, and New & Noteworthy Books. I guess the first list speaks for itself.

The Kindle Top Sellers list, though, has a glaring defect that really limits its usefulness in my opinion: many Kindle books are free or very cheap, and therefore might be overrepresented in the top seller list. As an example of this problem, I quickly opened the list right now and found a book called Weaving Words ranked #5. There are exactly two customer reviews of this book and the average rating is a pitiful 1-1/2 stars. The key to success? It’s free.

I would rather pay $9.99 for an absolutely awesome read than slog through a free book.

It’s not all bad in the Book Store

To be fair, there are definitely good parts about the book store. As I said last time, the free chapters are unbelievably handy. I have already read and dumped several boring first-parts of books. If there is a complaint about that, it is that often books come loaded with so much frufru before the first real chapter that the “first three chapters” you download really only include fifty pages of cruft, followed by ten pages of actual book.

On multiple occasions I have heard about a book from some other source and then hopped on to the Kindle Store. I then read a few reviews, read the first chapters, and then bought the book. This is a convenience that must be experienced.

The Record Club Blues

Remember a long time ago, when we rode our dinosaurs to school (my brother an I had to share one) and we did our homework on stone tablets? People were members of record clubs such as BMG or Columbia House. These were an awesome bargain, as long as you could negotiate the tricks and traps they used to induce you to buy records you never wanted.

The one real down side to a record club was that their catalog was always incomplete. I remember wishing I could find Pink Floyd at BMG and realizing that it probably was never going to happen. Different artists were often available from one club or another but not both.

Sadly, this phenomenon endures today in digital form. There are no sources of digital media that sell everything. The iTunes store and Amazon have different MP3 catalogs, and Barnes & Noble and Amazon have different eBook catalogs.

The limited catalog can be blamed in part to the need to prioritize which books to digitize: though I might want to read a particular Clive Cussler novel from 1975, Amazon might have put that on the back burner while they digitize more recent works.

Unfortunately, I imagine that the majority of the limited catalog is due to licensing, copyrights, and lawyers, as well as a desire to compete by not allowing your competitors to sell your best selection—a balkanization of authors that helps the book sellers more than the customers.

The fact that these eReader devices come hooked up to a book store and have built-in DRM means that the market is not open. I cannot browse the Barnes & Noble catalog from my Kindle and buy books there; likewise, a Nook user cannot buy from the Kindle store. This does not help us as consumers, as there is little chance that anyone will buy two of these expensive devices so they can access two catalogs.

Another problem that is caused by this nontransferable content is that you are now married to the product line. My Kindle book collection is worth more than the Kindle itself. Do I want to jump shop and move to a better device sold by a competitor in the future? No, and that’s exactly what Amazon wants. There is no incentive for any of the eBook manufacturers to make it easy for you to switch devices.

Final Thoughts

Given the state of the eBook market, it makes sense to choose a good device that has a predictable long future. Amazon is the online book powerhouse and is a safe bet for longevity. Reviewers are constantly singing the praises of the Kindle, and any new eReader review contains the obligatory comparison to Kindle.

I would heartily recommend this device to any avid reader. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago I was online with AppleCare working out the replacement of a problematic iPhone. We chatted a bit while waiting for reboots and such, and I’m fairly certain that I convinced the nice AppleCare woman that the Kindle is exactly what she needed in her life.

The key was that she said that she likes reading more than anything. If reading is what you live for, don’t delay. It’s not like “reading from a computer” and it’s far more convenient than a suitcase full of books.

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 books24x7 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.

If you are looking for step-by-step checklists and good solid advice about putting your digital life in order, then this book is for you.

The author covers a very broad swath of digital media, discussing topics such as video, music, and photography. She provides clear guidelines for prioritizing your efforts and crisp checklists.

In addition, this up-to-date book (January 2009) provides a good source of information about the leading software products available, with advice on features to look for. For example, while discussing photo management software, she mentioned the advantage of being able to select a large group of photographs and batch-rename them to something like “Egypt 001.jpg” through “Egypt 100.jpg”

The book gets geeky enough to whet the palate, without going too far. Topics such as EXIF data and nitty gritty settings for scanning photos are covered in depth.

Here’s the book on Amazon