What’s wrong with regular books? That’s the most frequent criticism I hear from people when they hear about Amazon’s new Kindle book reader, announced in February.
The answer, of course, is nothing. Books are great - not even the most devoted Kindle fan would argue with that. But for some people, the ability to carry hundreds (or even thousands) of books, plus the ability to immediately browse and start reading any number of a quarter of a million books in seconds from anywhere in America, all in a device that weighs less than an average paperback, is worth $359. And for those people, there is the Kindle.
Very iPodesque packaging
The first thing I noticed as I unboxed the Kindle 2 is that Amazon obviously envisions this device to be the iPod of books. The packaging is sleek and minimalist; they use form-molded recycled cardboard that is Amazon branded and incredibly compact. The manual is simple, in fact it would be inadequate if it were not for the fact that a more complete manual is included digitally on the device.
Thin and light
Holding the Kindle 2, I was struck by how thin it was. Previously, I had only seen the original Kindle, and it was in a leather case which made it even thicker. Holding the new Kindle, I was impressed. It fits very comfortably in your hand and is great for one-handed reading in bed, something that is difficult with traditional books. It’s also very sturdily built and doesn’t seem to scratch or blemish easily, although I have not subjected it to very rough handling - and don’t plan to.
Shopping for books on the device is amazingly easy. Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, automatically ties the device to the account used to purchase the Kindle (although you can change this if you are buying it as a gift for someone else). Buying a book is as easy as pressing “Buy” and waiting a few moments for the book to download. They say it can take a minute or two, but my experience has shown it to be almost immediate. It took maybe 15 seconds to download and start reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which, as the title suggests, is a very long book.
Most books available for the Kindle are $9.99 or less. I only encountered a couple books that were more. The only disappointing thing about the shopping experience was the selection. They have almost 250,000 books for the Kindle, but quite a few that I searched for were not available. In Amazon’s defense, most of the books I was looking for were older non-fiction. But then again, Grisham’s new novel The Associate, currently #2 on the New York Times fiction list is not in the Kindle store.
In other words, if you only want to read very specific books you may find yourself frequently disappointed. But if you are more open minded and just looking to read interesting books, there is plenty for everyone. There is a large breadth of selection in the Kindle store.
The most impressive thing about the Kindle is that it is more than a device - it is an entire platform. Amazon has also released a free Kindle application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will download any Kindle books you have purchased. There is no fee associated with downloading a book multiple times once you have purchased it - once you buy the rights to the book, you own it, and you can delete and re-download it as many times as you want (iTunes, are you listening?) You won’t necessarily need this feature very often - the device can hold thousands of books - but it is still nice to know that you don’t need to worry about backing up or saving any of your purchases or losing them in the future.
Noticing I have read further on my Kindle 2, the iPhone offers to skip to the furthest location read.
Amazon uses the wireless features of the Kindle platform in other creative ways. Personally, my favorite feature is how it keeps track of your current location in each book and syncs this information across devices. So, if you read a few pages on the Kindle 2, then pick up your iPhone later and start reading the same book, it will alert you of your progress on your other device and offer to take you to your previous reading position. (The concept of pages is made irrelevant by the Kindle since the text can be resized and therefore the amount of text that fits on one Kindle “page” is variable).
Of course, there are more traditional uses for the wireless on the Kindle as well. You can subscribe to blogs and newspapers for a fee, as well as use their experimental web browser. The web browser only works well on sites that are primarily text, and even then it is a bit slow. Sites like wikipedia work great though, and it’s nice to have this functionality. As an iPhone owner, I will probably rarely use this, but I’m glad Amazon included it either way.
There are a few other features I quickly want to cover. The screen is clear and crisp, as advertised. I’ve read it in bright sun and very low light and in both cases it is incredibly readable and did not cause any noticeable eye strain. However, it is not backlit, so it requires some source of light to read. The keyboard is very usable for short notes but isn’t great for writing much more than a few sentences. All notes you make about a book appear on your home screen under “My Clippings” as well as in the books at the locations where you make them. The battery seems to hold up as advertised, although I get a lot better battery life with the wireless turned off. The tradeoff is that with wireless off, it stops syncing the page number you are on and won’t download any periodicals you subscribe to (obviously). So this is just something you have to be conscious of and manually switch the wireless on at these times.
You don’t have to buy content for the Kindle 2. There are a variety of sources online to download books that are now in the public domain - the most popular is Project Gutenberg, although I have had some trouble accessing it recently. Others include manybooks.net and Feedbooks. Just plug the Kindle into your computer using the included USB cable and it should be mounted on your computer - put the downloaded books in the documents folder and you’re done! You also can transfer other files to the Kindle and use it as a USB storage device if you want - it has about 1.5 GB of space so it’s just as large as a lot of flash drives out there today.
So that’s the new Kindle. It’s quite an impressive device, I’ve now read a couple books on it as well as several newspapers and am loving it. If you decide to buy, please use this link - I get a kickback, and kickbacks make the world go round. Hey, at least I admit it.
