Kindle 2 Explorations, Part 2

My First Kindle Book Purchase

Recently I was at a Borders bookstore, and flipped through a paper copy of "A Short History of the United States" by Robert V. Remini. I'd already learned about this book through research I'd done from home. After looking at it in person, I decided to see how easy it would be to get via the Kindle 2.

Turned out it was dead easy -- fast and painless... now I need to find some more time to read the book!

My rapid purchase raised a concern. Amazon uses 1-Click to let you buy the books directly from the Kindle. This service normally lets you quickly buy stuff from your computer with minimal fuss, especially avoiding re-entering of your credit card info. Even though I currently have 1-Click disabled on my Amazon account, it is forced to be enabled for my Kindle. This means that if my Kindle were lost or stolen, someone could order books from the Kindle.

Naturally I wondered what to do, since there is no way to lock the Kindle with a password. So I wrote to Amazon, and here's what they wrote back:

"In case if your kindle is lost or stolen and you no longer have access to your Kindle, please visit the Manage Your Kindle page (http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle) and deregister it from your Amazon.com account.

"Deregistering online ensures that your Archived Items are no longer available from that Kindle and additional purchases from that Kindle won't be charged to your Amazon.com account.

"While we do not have the feature you have requested, we value strong customer feedback like yours..."

Obviously this is not ideal, but I don't intend to leave the Kindle sitting around at a cafe anyway.

Battery Life

A few people asked me how the battery life is. I'm happy to report it's excellent. Since the initial charge when I received the device, I charged it only once after about 1-1/2 weeks. Now keep in mind that I used the device only occasionally during that time. I had wireless "ON", which uses the battery up faster, so I imagine you could go weeks without charging depending on usage.

Bookmarks

Kindle automatically keeps track of where you left off reading each book. On a subsequent occasion, when you click on that book again it takes you to the last page you were reading. If you like you can also add bookmarks or notes to each book. If you like to go back and forth within a document, you might want to add a bookmark at the maximum location you've visited. That's because if you go back to an earlier page, that's the page the Kindle will remember.

Reading

So how does it to read a long document? Very pleasant -- actually I felt like I could fly through pages quickly. There's only a very slight delay after you press either of the Next Page buttons. Because the Kindle is so light, lighter than most any book, it's easy to hold (even for these programmer arms). I haven't yet tried reading in bed...

As I mentioned last time, you can adjust the font size. Here's an animated image from the Amazon site that demonstrates the different sizes:

Death of Paper

Many of the people I showed the Kindle to fretted over the death of paper newspapers, magazines, and books. They usually mention liking the feel of paper. Personally I also enjoy a break from my computer and don't want to see paper disappear. Obviously newspapers and magazines are already having serious problems. It is possible that ebook devices could help kill them off in the near future, and that would be sad.

Nevertheless, I don't expect paper publications to disappear anytime soon. New disruptive technologies tend to supplement previous technologies rather than replace them. For example, radio didn't kill phonographs, telephones didn't kill telegraphs, and TV didn't kill radio. Computers haven't even killed calculators.

Author Revenues

Another worry I hear about from friends relates to authors being ripped off. As a budding author I echo this concern. Recently there were some news articles about the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, and how it would cut into the audiobook revenue stream for authors. Here are two links related to these controversies:

Kindle 2.0's "Read to Me" Text to Speech feature under attack

Amazon: Kindle Owners Buy More Books

I think it's too soon to say whether authors will benefit from ebooks more than they would the old way. However, ebooks (or reading books on portable electronic devices more generally) will not go away. So the real solution is for authors to negotiate (through the Authors Guild et al.) favorable ebook publishing terms.

Comments

[Dave Buerger]

So how easy would it be for someone who stole your Kindle to get into your Amazon account and retrieve credit card info? Also, Would Amazon limit the amount of liability in case someone downloaded a bunch of books before you could disable the account? Credit card liabilit is $50 to cover this situation.

[Harry]

From what I can see, the person who stole the Kindle would only be able to buy books (until the rightful owner deregisters). They cannot see or change credit card info from the Kindle itself.

Regarding the owner's liability according to Amazon, I haven't been able to find that info. I imagine that the credit card terms would apply.

One aid to this situation is that Amazon emails you when you purchase a book with 1-Click from your Kindle. So if you were unaware your Kindle was gone, you would at least get an email that would make you start looking for it!