Last week I received my Kindle 2, the glorious new "wireless reading device" from Amazon.
In the upcoming weeks, I'll document my experiences as a new
Kindle user. I hope this will benefit others who might be interested in buying
one or comparing them to competing products, or who are just curious.
Before deciding on purchasing the Kindle, I read some
newspaper articles and comparative reviews. On balance it seemed to me that at
best there might be some devices that are almost as capable, but none that are
clearly superior within the price range. I was already happy with how easy it
is to purchase books with Amazon's web site, and decided that having the option
to buy from a list of approximately a quarter of a million titles for $10 a pop
was a terrific incentive.
After one week my initial reaction to the latest model is
quite positive. I never got to use the first version of the Kindle, which was
released in November 2007. However a few months ago on a plane, a man sitting
in the middle seat happily demonstrated the device to me and another passenger
to his right. He showed us the grayscale display, which benefits from ambient
light unlike a typical laptop screen, as well as the controls along the edges.
He seemed to be happy overall with the features (storage capacity, performance,
book availability, etc.) but noted that the usability was hampered a bit by the
positions of some of the buttons.
I was impressed by the fact that you can download books
quickly, without connecting it to your computer. The unit was fairly light and
it looked like it would be comfortable to read with it, once you became
accustomed to it. In fact the owner said it was pleasant to read in bed, if you
could leave a light on.
Regarding my new Kindle 2, the first thing I noticed was
that it shipped without any paper manual whatsoever. There was simply a
removable plastic sticker on the front of the device, with instructions on
charging it for the first time with the supplied USB cable. Once the device was
ready to use, I discovered an electronic user guide was available on the "Home"
page. The guide includes a few diagrams and is very well-done. I believe most
people will find their common questions answered there.
The Kindle has a small "5-way" controller that
let's you move the cursor around on the screen. It's like a tiny joystick but
with more limited positions. You can move it forward, back, left, or right, or
push down to "click." There are page controls on the left and right
sides of the device, and a QWERTY keyboard with tiny keys below the display.
Overall my out-of-box-experience can be summed up in one
word: WOW. It's very easy to start
reading with the Kindle. In the first week I demonstrated it to at least 10
people.
My biggest initial disappointment was the difficulty in
finding free books directly from the Kindle. One of my motivations for buying
the Kindle was that I heard that thousands of public domain books were
downloadable. I'm writing a political book that relies on some old books, some
of which are now available electronically. I figured that the Kindle would more
than pay for itself if I could avoid buying about 10 or 15 books.
Silly me -- Amazon wants to sell us books! I expected to use
the search capabilities to easily find a free version of Thoreau's
"Walden". Instead I saw only the non-free ones show up from the
Amazon store. The Kindle lets you do web searches too, but ultimately I decided
to use my notebook computer to find lists of free books that can be manually
downloaded and transferred to the Kindle. (More on that in a later blog post.)
My second significant disappointment was that even using the
largest font setting, my mom couldn't read the display without a magnifying
glass. Her vision is greatly impaired by macular degeneration, and I'd hoped
the Kindle would be easier to use for her than paper publications. I might try
using a Fresnel lens to see if that makes any difference for her.
So far I've only spent a few minutes at a time reading with
the Kindle. In a future post I'll report on how it feels to read for longer
stretches of time.
P.S. Although you might see links here to Amazon.com, I'm not an employee of Amazon and the opinions stated here are my own unless indicated otherwise.
