Kindle 2

Some of you may know that I purchased a Kindle reading device prior to leaving the US in August. Some of you probably didn't know that I bought one, but may have known that I was considering the purchase. My reasons for buying one, though expensive (although cheaper than when they were originally introduced), were several:

1. I like books.*

2. I will be doing a lot of traveling in the next couple of years.**

3. Books are heavy.

4. Books in English are not easy to find in some places (like Taiwan).

5. I like electronic gadgets.

This is a timely post because there is big news in the Kindle world. Up to now, Amazon only sold the devices in the US, but that is about the change. Starting on October 19 (curious timing – perhaps to take some of the buzz off of Microsoft’s planned 22 October release of its new Windows 7 operating system?), people in over 100 countries will also be able to buy the Kindle. But it gets even better – the prices are dropping AND the new version has a wonderful new feature, one that almost certainly would have led me to buy one if I hadn’t already – international wireless coverage.

In August, when I bought my Kindle, the devices were only sold in the US, and the wireless feature that allows you to purchase, download, and be reading your new book in less than 60 seconds flat only worked in the US. This is no longer the case. You can see the international wireless coverage for the new device here (just type in Taiwan at the top to see – it pretty much covers the entire island, save for the peaks of the mountain range that runs the length of the island’s east side). Did I mention that the wireless coverage is free? It is, even internationally.

My purposes in this post are several. First, I want to do a sort of “review” of this user’s experiences with the device after about 2 months. I can certainly say that it has been integrated into my lifestyle – I use it pretty much every day.

In “reviewing” the device, I want to take a brief look at e-books in general. Amazon is not the only player in the field, only the latest. What is the allure of the e-book? Why do some people despise them?

So why pay several hundred dollars to be able to read books on a machine? Kindle and Amazon’s proprietary format certainly aren’t the only format out there, far from it. To begin with, Sony has an e-book reader that is somewhat popular, and some books are available for free as PDF documents online. (I am not going to touch on the aspects of e-books related to intellectual property rights and digital rights management (DRM). Randall Stross wrote a nice piece in The New York Times that discussed these issues.) There is also a Mobipocket format that in a DRM-free format, can be read by Kindle. Barnes and Noble recently entered the e-book market and has their own e-book retailing effort (with over 700,000 titles currently available – take that, Amazon!). Barnes and Noble went the way of having a proprietary book reading software, but not a proprietary device. It can be used on computers and mobile devices like cell phones (this leads to the “eye strain” problem – read on for more about this). Finally, the website Scribd.com this year started allowing authors to sell copies of digital documents online, leading some authors to embrace it as a way to publish their work in an electronic format as an alternative to dominant players Amazon and Google. (For more on factors to consider in choosing a format for e-books, read this nice article by Peter Wayner in The New York Times.)

I think portability is a big part of why to think about going for e-books. I can fit a lot of stuff on my Kindle. I currently have in excess of 40 books and papers stored on it, as well as an audiobook. I have used approximately 15% of the device’s memory in putting these items on the machine.

Many people are critics of the Kindle. It certainly has shortcomings, but I think that overall it is a good machine that does what it is supposed to do. Before I bought mine, I read several reviews of the device, including one in the New Yorker and another on the blog of a fellow 2009 Olmsted Scholar whose postings I have previously touted in this space.

The New Yorker article basically denounced the Kindle for not being a book. I am not sure it will ever be possible for a machine to "be" a book, to feel like a book, to smell like a book, etc. To me, that isn't really a viable criterion for the machine, although I know that for some people that is a "show-stopper."

I am more pragmatic about the Kindle - will it help me gain access to high-quality reading material? Will it allow me to do so in a convenient manner? Are the books and periodicals available on the device reasonably priced? I think these are all "yes" answers. In this I am in agreement with Reach at Buildingpeace.net, he also found the device’s portability to be a boon.

What does it do well? Text. Black and white images. (The screen is only black and white - no color.) But unlike the 1^st generation Kindle, which only featured 4 different shades of variation, the 2^nd generation can do 16, which has the potential to make some pretty decent images, even though it doesn’t sound like all that many gradations in the grand scheme of things. If you read periodicals that are text-centric (such as Foreign Affairs), the Kindle edition is pretty much the same as what you would see in the print edition.

For an example of how the Kindle does with images, I recently finished reading Dan Brown's new book The Lost Symbol on Kindle. In print, the book is over 500 pages and has some graphics (renderings of symbols vexing our hero Robert Langdon). As far as I could tell, the graphics were all rendered correctly on the Kindle's screen.

Some people have been critical of the device with regard to viewing periodicals, saying not all of the content from the print edition makes it into the Kindle edition. I believe one place I recall this being a problem was with The New Yorker, specifically the cartoons found in the print edition. I cannot comment on this specific issue, because I do not read The New Yorker on my Kindle - I have an online subscription, which comes with its own attendant problems, such as having to read the long articles on the computer monitor (thus inviting loads of eye strain) or printing them out to read (which sort of defeats one of the main purposes of the online subscription, using less paper and printer ink, although the reason I subscribe online is that I do not want to pay the extra money for the print edition to be shipped internationally, not to mention the time delay I would face in receiving such a mailing).

With regard to newspapers and periodicals with a lot of images, this is a place where the Kindle falls short. For newspapers, the screen is simply not big enough to make a reasonable representation of a newspaper's broadsheet, although the Kindle DX (an extra-large version of the regular Kindle reader, with a 9.7" screen [diagonally measured]) comes close, according to the hype.

I recently received an offer from for the purchase of a Kindle DX bundled with a year’s subscription to The New York Times, and a Kindle cover thrown in to boot for $499. (Kindle covers generally cost extra – I paid $29.99 plus tax for the black leather cover on my Kindle.) If you think about the price of the DX alone ($489 last time I checked), not to mention the monthly subscription price for the NYT newspaper ($13.99/mo), it’s really not a bad deal. If I didn’t already have a 6” screen Kindle (and I lived in the US – Kindle DX is not currently international wireless-capable), I may have pulled the trigger on that deal. ($500 is nothing to sniff at, though.)

A feature that is not advertised a lot about the device is that you can, after a simple conversion process, read PDF files on it. I have found this to be useful in the first month of graduate school, as that I am required to read many articles for various classes, many of which are accessed via an e-journal system available through the school library. The articles can be saved as PDF files, converted to Kindle documents, and then I can carry my articles for school with me for easy access. This saves trees and my back (by making my book bag lighter).

It is also possible to highlight and make notes in the books and papers on Kindle. The machine then compiles all your highlights and notes (entered using a somewhat awkward QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of the device’s face) into an easy-to-access “My Clippings” file.

I mentioned in an earlier post how at my school in Taiwan students are largely on their own to acquire their needed books - the university's bookstore simply does not seem to stock a lot of the required readings. I had *hoped* that at least some of the books I needed but could not find at the university bookstore or local bookstores would be available to me via Kindle. I believe exactly one of the dozen-plus books I was looking for was available online for Kindle (I bought it). Amazon says that over 350,000 books are available on the Kindle, but many somewhat obscure political science texts are not currently part of this number. I am confident that as time goes on, this number of available books will continue to increase and this lack of desired books on the device will become less and less of an issue.

On this topic, I have explored various avenues to acquire the books I need for school, including looking at local bookstores (not a heck of a lot of books in English there, and almost none aside from current bestsellers, but I was able to find one book that I needed), buying one book from Barnes and Noble online (it was cheaper than at Amazon – but the shipping to have it sent here quickly cost more than the book itself!), Google Books (which boasts the ability to search the full text of over 7 million books, a number that is sure to grow by leaps and bounds in the wake of the recent settlement of an important class action lawsuit regarding copyright protection of books that was filed several years ago against Google Books – read more about it at Wired.com), and Amazon’s “See Inside” feature, where you can read a few pages of a book at a time without buying it. I’ve also used the favorite amongst poor graduate students – getting the library copy of the book and photocopying chapter upon chapter. This last method is probably the most affordable way to do it, and the school library has most of the books I need, but in the end I have just great big mounds of “handouts” stapled or clipped together; I don’t really have books. In summary, the “book acquisition process” here this semester is still a work in progress, one that the Kindle plays a small (but hopefully growing) role in

What else about the Kindle? As advertised, I have read on it in direct sunlight with no problem. You do not develop eye strain when reading on the Kindle like you will after reading too much Garblog on your backlit computer screen. It is light and thin. It seems relatively durable to this point, having survived falling off a bench in the subway (dropped about 1.5 feet), and it is daily crammed in my bag like a sardine with no ill effect thus far. I use the USB cable to load new books and papers onto it, which is not much of a hassle (think syncing your iPod with a cable) – although wireless would be a lot nicer, and I did like the wireless feature when I was able to use it briefly in the US prior to moving to Taiwan.

Most books on Kindle cost $9.99, although there are quite a few that can be had for free, right from Amazon.com. (No Napster-type action here!) In fact, as I write this, 8 of the top 10 Kindle bestsellers on Amazon.com cost $0.00. Check it out! I recently “purchased” (for $0) Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Machiavelli’s The Prince (we will discuss Machiavelli’s work in my international relations class next week).

I want to talk about the Kindle’s supposed Read-to-Me “feature.” In my opinion, this is a definite “miss.” I tried listening to one book using this text-to-speech function and had to stop after less than two sentences. Anyone who has heard a real audiobook (such as the fine material available at Audible.com) will be able to tell you that the Kindle’s text-to speech business has a ways to go before it is even close to being something called a feature for the Kindle. I liked David Pogue’s (the tech reviewer for The New York Times) take on it, calling the voices “oddly Norwegian” and “utterly incapable of expressing emotion.”

The Kindle does have an external speaker, however, so if you forget your headset, you can still listen to your audiobooks (and so can everyone else around you).

Wireless Kindle users who have an iPhone (there is a Kindle for iPhone application) can even sync their Kindle and their iPhone so that if you decide to read for a bit on your iPhone, the spot you read to on it will be automatically synced with the actual Kindle reader, and vice verse. I am not in this group, although my sister in law is.*** I may be, supposing that at some point in the future I move back to the US and purchase an iPhone.

This is not to say that I no longer read actual books. As I mentioned above, lack of availability of titles is still a problem, and will be for some time, although Amazon’s goal in this respect is the sky, so to speak:

Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.

Good luck to Jeff Bezos and crew on that one, and in the meantime I will use this Kindle 2. Anyone else?

GJS

*Purists no doubt will call me out on this saying, "If you like books, why not buy books? Not a machine that is meant to approximate the book-reading experience."

** Probably for at least the next 10 years, really, but certainly for the next 2 years.

***Thanks to K. for introducing me to the Kindle and helping to create a monster!