The Amazon Kindle
I have wanted an Amazon Kindle since they were first put on the market. Unfortunately when they first came out at $499, there was no way I could make that kind of financial sacrifice to add another gadget to my collection. Over time, the new version 2 of the kindle came out and the price dropped from $499 to $359 to $299 to $259. Thanks to the Great Tondini, I found one under the Christmas tree this year...
During my past three years or so back in school, I had to get out of my standard reading routine in order to read textbooks instead of novels. Now that I'm finished with school, I am moving back into my standard reading routine. Since Christmas day, I have read two new novels and part of a third on the Kindle, and I have already formed some serious opinions on the device that I just wanted to share. I do not have experience with the Sony Reader or the Barnes and Noble Nook, but my thoughts here are rather independent of the actual device. My feelings would generally apply equally to either of the other devices.
I guess we can start with the things I really like about the Amazon Kindle. The size of the Kindle is roughly equivalent to most books at 8" x 5.3". It's also thin at .36" and easy to hold. It's fairly easy to navigate and the menus are self explanatory for the most part. The Kindle has enough storage capability to hold approximately 1500 books, give or take. That's probably more books than I'll read between now and the time this device becomes obsolete. Books for the Kindle are inexpensive. Choices from the best-sellers list can be purchased for $10 or less and they are wirelessly delivered to the device. Some books are less expensive than $10 and there is a ton of free material available as well. Once a book is purchased, it becomes part of your Kindle library on Amazon.com. If your Kindle ever takes a swim or decides to stay behind on a park bench, your library will still be intact once you replace the device. The battery life on the Kindle is very good. I basically read each novel that I have finished so far on a single charge of the device. That mileage will obviously vary from person to person, but I am impressed with that. The Kindle is designed to be energy efficient. You can increase the battery life by turning off the wireless connectivity and only turning it back on when you need it for something such as downloading new content or receiving Kindle automatic software updates. When it comes time to charge the Kindle, you simply connect it to its USB charging cable that either plugs into a standard power outlet or a PC USB port. Reading on the Kindle is a lot easier than I thought it might be. The display is not like a standard LCD. It's not back-lit, so you do need adequate light for reading when using this device. The screen is quite easy to read in bright light and outdoors as well. The screen is 6" diagonally, and you may adjust the font from too tiny to I'm blind sizes. The Kindle automatically remembers where you stop reading and allows you to resume from that point at any time. You can also create specific bookmarked points and return to those at your leisure. If the book you are reading supports it, you can navigate from chapter to chapter by using the joystick, but not all books support this as I will mention in my dislikes section of this review. If you find a passage you would like to save in a book or other text, you can highlight the selection and it will be saved in your highlights section that can be reviewed or edited via a USB connection to your PC. One of my favorite features on the Kindle is the integrated dictionary. If I stumble across a word I don't recognize, I can move the cursor to that word and get a definition.
Thats a lot of stuff I like... It feels kind of strange because it's more of a feature list of the device. There are more features, bells, and whistles, but these are the items I'm thinking about currently as reasons I like the Amazon Kindle. There are some things I don't like about the Kindle and other similar devices on the market.
If I leave my Kindle sitting on a park bench or on a table in the local coffee shop, I'm out of an expensive toy. If I left a book behind, it wouldn't sting as much. That's not likely to happen, but it could. I have left books behind before. It doesn't feel like a book. It's obviously not a book, but there is a bit of a mental hurdle involved in switching from a physical book to a Kindle. I don't think it's an insurmountable hurdle though. If the battery in a Kindle dies, you can't read until you get charged back up. I have never had to worry about charging a book before! When I finish reading a book on the Kindle, I can't loan it to a friend. Likewise, I can't borrow a book that another friend has finished on his or her Kindle. This little problem of sharing books may be addressed at some point, but in a best case scenario, you would only be able to share with other Kindle owners. Navigating within Kindle books can be a bit tedious if you want to do certain things. Some books will let you move easily from chapter to chapter while others will not. I'm not sure if it's a simple formatting issue for the book or what, but it's annoying sometimes. Kindle books do not use standard page numbers. They use a concept called locations. The size of a page on the kindle varies based on what font size you have selected, so the page number concept doesn't work so solidly on an electronic book. You can navigate directly to a location but I'm not sure exactly how a location is defined yet. The last novel I read had approximately 5000 locations to choose from. In the paper version, there were about 270 pages, so I'm not sure what the correlation is. At any rate, it's not like flipping through paper pages. The Kindle does have a keyboard, so making notes in the margin of the electronic book sort of possible, but not in the traditional sense. The Kindle is a lot more fragile than a regular book. You have to be careful about tossing it in your backpack or laptop bag and hauling it around. It' can't take the beating that a regular book might get in normal transit. If you are a fan of watching your library of books grow on shelves, you can kiss that aspect of being an avid reader goodbye.
There are a lot of trade-offs I suppose. It will be fun to watch this technology evolve...
