Kindle 2 Review
Within a few hours of playing with my Kindle 2 for the first time, I mentioned on Twitter that it was a tragedy Douglas Adams had not lived to see one.
If I compare my mental image of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the experience of reading Wikipedia on a Kindle, the only things missing are: centralized editing, “Don’t Panic” on the cover, and a sense of humor.
Mere moments later, I hopped over to xkcd and read this comic. Clearly the similarities had not been lost on anyone else.
I am not the sort of person that “reads” “books”, historically speaking, and so I approached the Kindle 2 with a certain trepidation that I could very well be funneling $359 directly into the toilet. These days I read virtually everything I’m likely to read online. The only offline things I read are magazines and comic books, because I have the attention span of a sick wasp.
However, I live in the great state of Oregon, the capital of which is Powell’s Books, and there is a palpable stigma here associated with a person who does not read actual literature. It was beginning to get me down. “Maybe,” I thought, being fully aware of my status as technology-obsessed lunatic, “if I bought a Kindle 2, I would start reading more.”
Anyone who has known me for more than 30 seconds will instantly see right through that as the paper-thin excuse to buy a shiny-rectangle-with-a-screen that it is. But I digress.
The device itself is both lovely to look at and lovely to hold. It’s light enough that you can hold it in one hand for an extended reading session without much arm fatigue to speak of, and it’s no thicker than an average magazine. Considering we are talking about a company that is not Apple, they have really done a tremendous job on the industrial design, especially considering the Kindle 1 looked like it might have, at any moment, flown through a trench on the Death Star on its way to shoot fireballs down an exhaust port.
The e-paper screen is a marvel to behold. You’d be forgiven for spending a few minutes trying to figure out how to get the printed plastic overlay off the screen before realizing that is the screen. It is much more comfortable to read than an LCD panel, and has a much higher pixel density — from reading distance, it really does look like a sheet of paper. Being reflective, it only gets better the more ambient light you throw at it. But, like a real book, it doesn’t self-illuminate in any way and becomes harder to read in the dark.
The entity we call Amazon has become a finely-honed machine for taking your money. Any possible friction in the express tunnel from your wallet to their bank account has been painstakingly excised. It’s both frightening and wonderful. I’ve been an Amazon Prime subscriber for a while now, and the fact that I can click a single button on their website and stuff shows up at my house two days later is exhilarating, addictive, and downright dangerous to my financial wellbeing. Nobody, but nobody, sells you shit better than Amazon does.
And so it is then that when you press the “Menu” button on your Kindle 2, the item selected by default is “Shop at the Kindle Store”. You glorious bastards.
The greatest mystery of the Kindle is the built-in 3G EVDO wireless connection that you don’t have to pay for (beyond the cost of the device itself, of course, and the delivery charge of a few cents per document if you elect to email personal text, PDF, or Word documents to the device.) How they pulled that off I’ll never know.
The basic web browser that’s included won’t win any awards, but that’s missing the point. This is a device meant for reading books, and the fact that it has a web browser at all is rather astonishing. It’s perfectly serviceable for a quick Google or Wikipedia look-up, and you will feel like a Galactic Hitchhiker the first time you try it, even if you already Google things daily from your mobile phone.
It works well, in fact, with the mobile version of NewsGator, which is handy if you’re already syncing with NetNewsWire, and puts the spotlight on one of the Kindle’s bigger misfeatures: pay-for blogs. For generally about 99 cents to $1.99 per month, you can have a “subscription” to one of the more well-known blogs automatically delivered to your Kindle. I can’t think of any good reason anyone would do this, especially when you can hit the mobile version of an online aggregator for free and read any blog. There’s a further downside which is that many popular blogs are link-heavy and content-light, which makes them a poor match for a device where internet access is a second-class citizen.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the DRM issue. When you “buy” these electronic books, you are essentially just setting a flag on Amazon’s server that you did, at some point, give them some money for permission to read the item. You can move items on and off your Kindle as capacity demands (which is superior to the iTunes model of “you better back this up because you have to pay for it again if you lose it”), but you will never be able to print them out, loan them to a friend, or transfer them to some other reading device.
However, you gain some benefits vs. traditional books, such as the ability to search them with nearly instant results (especially useful for technical references). And you can make clippings or annotations in your e-books without ruining them.
In honor of Mr. Adams, the first book I purchased was The Salmon of Doubt, which was an odd decision, as I already own it in book form. However, I’ve never read it. It has been sitting on my shelf for years, calling for me to get off the damn internet and come read it already. And now that I have the Kindle version, I’m already about a third of the way through.
So there you have it. Unarguable, conclusive proof that a Kindle turns you into a more frequent reader.
If you think you might like to get a Kindle of your own, I will get a few cents back from Amazon if you do so through my referral.
