Kindle (Gadget Review)
December 14th, 2010
Suddenly books, millions of them - in my hand!
Ok. I will not bother with the minutiae of marketing drone talk and tell you how it will revolutionize the way we read books. It won’t.
Well, to be honest, it has potential but there are certain impediments on its path to world domination and most of them are not technical but social — and dealing with the pesky meatbags we call other people brings with it its own baggage. And by baggage I mostly mean greed. Filthy greedy bastards the lot of ‘em.
To even potentially connect with your mind I must of course give you some sort of yard stick to which I can compare the Kindle to.
Exhibit A: Apple’s iProducts — namely, in relevant order:
- iPad
- iPhone
- iPod Touch
I would like to write that iPad, being the largest of the family, is the only real competitor from Apple, but I cannot forego the fact that I personally have read half a dozen books on my old iPod Touch (3g, with the sucky resolution) with Stanza.
One of the reasons I must keep iPhone/iPod on the list is that these are usually the devices people always carry with them and thus are ever providing you ample opportunity to just start your favorite ebook program, be it Kindle or Stanza, and read that comedy book on the toilet or whatever.
On the other hand, the physical size of the devices is a draw-back and that’s where the Kindle and iPad step in.
Exhibit B: Books.
Might seem obvious, but of course I would be remiss not to bring regular pocket and hardcover books into this review, since those are basically whose throne Amazon, Sony, Apple et al are trying to usurp.
Of these two exhibits I would propose that books are the more universal yard stick.
In general I find that Kindle fills the space between books and the iPad. It has more functionality than a book in itself but less so than the iPad — and this, I believe, is a good thing.
Of our three competitors for the Best Way To Read Stuff the humble book comes most varied in weight, form, feel and color. From the leaf thin ”All the Good Things Hitler Did” to the massive bulk of ”Wikipedia: Unabridged”.
The smallest of the small books would be lighter than the Kindle, but in general — and especially with hardcovers — books will outweigh the Kindle greatly.
Given that the Kindle and the iPad do not gain weight as more and more books are pushed into them, the weight difference there too is to the Kindle’s advantage. The Kindle’s weight is only one third of that of the iPad.
One of the weirdest things with the Kindle is its display. Because there is no backlight, the display is always on and looks like a piece of light grey plastic that someone has printed letters on — like a piece of faux screen showing you what the real deal will look like on modern electronics once you turn on the power. Except with the Kindle you don’t strip that screen off and then see the “real” display — that is the real deal.
It’s even a bit unnerving to see the display constantly on, because in my mind the assumption is that to display anything electronically will require power and if something is displaying constantly it is therefore constantly draining power. This old assumption is not correct with the Kindle’s e-ink technology.
The only things that drain power on the Kindle are refreshing the display and using the wireless.
Turning a dot from black to white or white to black is the thing that requires an electrical charge, but it staying in its current state doesn’t. Although to say “white” or “black” is a slight misrepresentation, since the e-ink display has 16 shades of grey, from “none” to “full black”.
The nature of the e-ink technology in the Kindle very conveniently causes the device to have a very nice battery life. I charged mine up via USB the day I got it, and after reading a 600+ page book during the following month the device, still had juice left in it without me having to charge it once. Mind you, I did keep the wireless turned off except for a few five-minute shopping sessions.
In contrast to the iPad, the Kindle’s background is not lit and with that comes a pro and a con, hand in hand:
Because the Kindle has no back light it causes less eye strain, since it is akin to reading a page in a book instead of reading from your monitor.
Because the Kindle has no back light, you cannot read in the dark without a light.
To users of regular books this latter seems like a non-issue, since that is the status quo with books. But for me it was definitely a con.
When I was reading with Stanza on my iPod I could switch to ‘night mode’ and it would make the background black and foreground white and then I could turn down the brightness of the device all the way down for minimal eye strain. Because of this feature I could easily read a few chapters of my current book when climbing to bed hours after my wife had turned in without having to risk waking her with my reading light.
This issue has also come up in public transportation, when the vehicle hasn’t had all of its internal lights on during evening/night shifts.
Even though I would gladly recommend Kindle even without it, the built-in Oxford Dictionary is superb and adds a lot of value to the device. Just place your caret in front of the unknown word and enjoy the feeling of your vocabulary expanding. Caveat: foreign phrases of two or more words still need to be manually searched.
Of course this feature is available in the Kindle app for iPad too, but for books you need to buy this as a plug-in application (an actual dictionary).
Given that my general outlook on the Kindle is quite positive, I must elaborate on one the biggest impediments I see for it: lack of titles.
With Amazon.com boasting 750’000 titles for sale and 1,8 million free books up for grabs I must be insane to say that there is a lack of titles.
Amazon is of course focused on bringing all new releases to the Kindle and if you like reading the latest releases then this really does not apply to you.
The two types of books Amazon currently does not cover that well are older books — for example the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons is nowhere to be found — and books in other languages besides English.
Of course this is just a matter of time, but mostly it is depending on publishing houses and writers to make their works available as ebooks on Amazon. But for some reason I am not that optimistic on the fill rate for older books — but we shall see.
With regards to books that Amazon actually does have stock of Kindle versions I need to tell a small tale on the topic of greed, lobbying and yielding to market forces.
Once upon a time, when Amazon announced their device, they set forth their noble goal of ALL ebooks being equal in value and price: $9,99. Market forces would have none of this. They reared up on their hind legs and spoke in a booming voice, thundering over all the departments of Amazon. They spewed forth great disdain with vim and vigor and implied denouncement of support for this newborn cub, Kindle. Verily did Amazon harken to these requests saying “One shall not evacuate one’s bowels where one wishes to consume nutrients.” And alas, so it came to be that not all books were equal in standing in the eyes of their Lord, Amazon.
And basically today, this has transformed to a situation that is somewhat ass-backwards. For example Bush Jr’s autobiography is priced at $23.40 for the Kindle, $18.89 as hardcover and $23.10 as paperback.
Now I am sure that the hardcover is just probably on sale due to the oncoming season, but it doesn’t change the fact that a) it’s more than twice the originally promised $9,99 and b) it is pricier than EITHER of those other formats. Sure the ordering of the Kindle version does not incur postage costs for the buyer, but nor does it cost extra for the seller.
Here’s a few notable things that weren’t afforded chapters of their own.
(Shhh! The Whispernet)
To buy books you have two options: buy them directly on the device and endure quite a sluggish Amazon browsing session or use your desktop browser on Amazon.com and just select ”Deliver to [my device]”. The next time you turn your wireless on — unless it’s always on — the purchase will be automatically delivered to you.
In addition to books, you can subscribe to magazines on Amazon.com. For example I subscribed to TIME magazine for under three bucks a month and every Friday I get next week’s issue delivered to my device automatically in the morning. The daily news paper subscriptions are in the range of just under $30 a month.
(Undercover)
When you or anyone else is reading a book on a Kindle, it is not possible without peeking at the screen to know which book it is. This of course can be a good thing — you can read Mein Kampf or Mein Scantily Clad Ladies and no one is the wiser. And it can also be a bane, since you cannot display how hip/trendy/sensitive/intellectual you are by reading Oprah’s book of the month.
(I hear voices)
The Kindle, as well as the iPad, supports Audible audio books and since your Audible account can be linked to your Amazon account, the device can download your purchased audio books and play them via speakers or head phones.
(Pre-emptive Disarmament Foiled)
If you have an existing library of ebooks in PDF format, have no fear because Kindle has built-in support for PDF books. Just plug in your device via USB, drag your PDFs onto the device and start reading.
Caveat: there are many PDF formats, some encode text as text and some rasterize the text as just lines, for the latter using the [aA]-button on the Kindle to change font size will just zoom in on the file and you may need to scroll horizontally, which is quite a big pain when reading.
On the other hand, I have tried PDF books which contain the text as text and scaling it up worked just fine and was a pleasure to read.
(Shady business)
Since the device has 16 shades of grey, even pictures work to some extent on the device. But of course here is where the iPad shines, since it has a much higher resolution color display for your picture viewing pleasure.
One obvious win for the iPad over Kindle in this regard is comics. Unless you are only reading Sin City, you will be better off reading your comics on an iPad rather than the Kindle; but iPad vs comic books is another matter.
One of the things proponents of the Apple family of devices bring up as a down side for the Kindle is its apparently overwhelming lack of functionality and features the Apple devices have: games, email, FaceBook, video, apps et.c.
My stance on this issue is simple: I want less of stuff I could get distracted by.
The paradox of choice: The more choices you have in front of you, the more it cripples your actions, since you cannot help but try to compare all of your choices from every angle and end up doing nothing.
The Kindle provides you with three things: Read something, buy something to read or turn the device off. It is specialized hardware for the specific task of reading books. The iPad is generalized hardware with which you can do almost an infinite amount of things of which reading is just one.
If you want books, be it one or a hundred, at your avail in an easy, comfortable and portable solutions — choose the Kindle. If you want a computer that just so happens also functions as a reading apparatus — well… you pick your poison, but you could go with iPad or any other tablet or netbook computer.
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