Physical Characteristics
Considering the small size of the Kindle, it’s hard to believe it comes in such a large package. The box is designed to evoke a hardcover book, and it succeeds on that point. You open it by unfastening an elastic loop from a small stud on the front cover, allowing the two halves of the box to open. On the right you’ll see the new Kindle, nestled safely inside, with a very brief “get started” guide printed on the screen protector. A box of accessories and such is on the left. The design reminds me quite strongly of Apple’s packaging, and I’m sure that effect was intentional. After all, the Kindle is poised to do for ebooks what the iPod did for music, so I’m sure the folks at Amazon are aspiring to that same level of success, even though they know this first generation Kindle is unlikely to do so.
The Kindle measures just under 7.5″ long, 5.25″ wide, and 0.5″ thick at its thickest point. It is almost exactly the same size as a trade paperback book, though just a bit shorter than most. It’s also wedge shaped, with the left edge sloping back to provide a comfortable grip and making the page turning buttons on each side the thinnest parts of the device. That makes the page turning buttons very easy to activate, which is both a blessing and a curse, as discussed more fully in the Usage section below.
The screen measures just under 6″ diagonally, and it truly is a thing of beauty. The text at any size is crisp and clear, and the lack of a backlight makes glare-free reading a pleasantly comfortable exercise. This can be a problem at night, of course, and if you don’t want to turn on a lamp you can add a clip-on booklight to illuminate the screen. In all other respects it works perfectly, and the ability to read in direct sunlight is a joy indeed.
To the right of the screen you’ll find a status bar, and just underneath it is a scroll wheel. The scroll wheel has good tactile feedback, so it isn’t too hard to use, though “clicking” the scroll button can be tricky and cause you to highlight the wrong line at times. It is also slightly “tacky” and is an absolute magnet for dust and debris, so I found myself constantly cleaning it off.
The keyboard is located at the bottom of the screen, and while it took some getting used to at first, it is nicely laid out and easy to use. There are several special keys such as the @ and / symbols, as well as a search key and a font control that are extremely useful. There is some lag with the keyboard, as others have noted, but I found that if I just kept typing away and ignored what it said on the screen that everything was entered properly, with no skipped letters.
The bottom edge of the device has the headphone jack, mini-USB port, charge connector, and volume control bottons. The back of the Kindle has the on-off switch and the wireless on-off switch. Most of the back of the device is made of a soft rubberized cover that can be removed to provide access to the user-replaceable battery and the SD card slot.
The cover that comes with the Kindle (its use is strongly suggested by Amazon) is of good quality and construction. Made of black material, it closes with an elastic band that wraps around the right side of the cover. Inside you’ll find a plain grey interior, with some extra padding right over the screen. It is perfectly sized to hold the Kindle, but it doesn’t hold the Kindle as securely as I would like; this does however make it easier to remove for reading. There are a variety of third party cases and covers available, and I’ll be reviewing two of them in the near future.
Usage
The Kindle is indeed simple to use; any child or adult of reasonable intelligence can figure it out immediately, though there are plenty of quirks that greatly enhance the experience as you stumble across them. When you first receive the Kindle, the instructions tell you to charge it, then a brief introduction to the device and basic use is presented. While I’m ordinarily NOT the type to read instruction manuals of any kind (except for assembly diagrams) I strongly suggest that you read the manual for the Kindle. There are a surprising number of features that aren’t immediately apparent that can greatly enhance the reading experience.
After that, you’re set loose to start shopping for books on the Kindle store, which is well organized and easy to navigate. You can browse bestsellers, search for a particular title or author, view all books by an author, etc. You also have the option of receiving a sample of any book you like, and delivery takes just a few seconds.
Content & Pricing
As far as content is concerned, the Kindle store is certainly impressive–there are more than 120,000 books available for the Kindle. Bestsellers and literary fiction are very well represented, and you will likely find more things to read than time in which to read them. One small personal disappointment is the fact that most of the titles in the store are quite new, which means that a lot of the older books I want to purchase in Kindle format aren’t available. Hopefully this is a matter of time, but you might want to browse the Kindle store on Amazon.com before you purchase the device, to make sure that the types of books, as well as particular titles and/or authors, are available for purchase.
I can’t complain about the pricing though–the most expensive Kindle books are $9.99 each, and prices for older titles, classic literature, and the like are often much lower. If you’re already an ebook reader, this can represent a substantial savings. Many books at eReader.com and Fictionwise are well over $10, reflecting the fact that a trade paperback or mass market edition is not yet available. Want to read World WIthout End? The Kindle edition costs $9.99, but the eReader edition is a whopping $26.25–that’s actually $3.15 higher than the Amazon price for the hardcover book!
If you’re a real cheapskate, you can easily import your own ebooks and business documents–the Kindle supports Microsoft Word, HTML, text, Mobipocket ebooks, and several image formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP). Acrobat PDF files are supported on an experimental basis, which means that you can try the conversion process on your own documents–you might get lucky and get great results, or they could come out unreadable. All of those files can be tranferred from your computer if you connect your Kindle with the included USB cable, with an SD card, or over the air by emailing them to your Kindle. There’s a ten cent charge if you decide to do it wirelessly, but if you really need something in a hurry, that’s a small price to pay.
Wireless
I found the wireless coverage to surprisingly strong; I was able to shop the store and download sample books at my home, my office, while on a commuter train, and even in the basement of a building in which I couldn’t get any cell phone coverage at all with AT&T (the Kindle operates on Sprint’s network). The samples were generally a chapter or so, plenty enough to decide if I want to read the entire book or not. There is also an option to save books to a “wish list” for potential later purchase.
I also tried out the experimental web browser and found that it might be OK for very basic browsing in a real pinch, but not for any heavy-duty browsing; most web sites are simply too “graphic” for the display of the Kindle, which can display simple graphics but was truly designed for text. I was able to use it for a Google search, but not to access my GMail, and found that I would much rather use my iPod Touch or my Pocket PC for any serious browsing.
Reading
Reading however, is a different story. One of the main goals for the designers of the Kindle was to make it “disappear” so that users would simply fall into the book reading experience, instead of being reminded that they were using an electronic device rather than a printed book. In that respect, I think the designers largely succeeded, and in some ways improved on the familiar bookreading experience.
Once you choose the book you want to read from the home screen, reading can be as simple or as involved as you like. If you’re reading a light novel for entertainment, you likely won’t do much more than press the Next Page button as necessary to advance the text, unless you want to enlarge the font. Reading in this way is truly a pleasure, and the Kindle does seem to “disappear” into the background.
If you are reading something more complicated, such as a non-fiction text or something you may be studying more deeply for a class, you may find that the Kindle actually provides a better reading experience than a traditional printed and bound book. I found this to be the case with the Honor Harrington novel I read on the Kindle; the author sometimes throws out rather arcane terms with which I am not familiar. This usually means that my eye slides right by the offending word; I’ve never been one to actually stop what I’m doing and go look something up in the dictionary. A bad habit to be sure, but I don’t run across unknown words very often.
Imagine my delight then, when I can use the scroll wheel on the right hand side to navigate to the line that contains the unfamiliar term, press it to bring up the menu, and choose lookup, which will give me a brief definition of every word on the line in just a few seconds! If I want a more detailed definition, I can choose any of the words on the line and get more information, including the origin and etymology, if available. I’ve already learned several new words this way that I ordinarily would have skipped right over. Obviously this feature will be of even greater value to students or anyone else studying textbooks, technical manuals, and the like.
Additional Features
Other features include the ability to highlight a particular passage, add bookmarks, and enter your own notes on the text. The highlight ability is limited, since you can’t select anything across the page boundary, and it isn’t as precise as similar features found in other book readers such as Microsoft Reader, but it is functional. Even better, the wireless capability ensures that your notes and highlights are always backed up on Amazon’s servers, so you’ll never lose any of your work. You can also copy notes over to your computer when you connect the Kindle via USB.
One of my favorites is the bookmark feature, though it can be a little clumsy to scroll the cursor all the way to the top of the screen each time. It’s activated only at the top corner, and the “page” folds down a bit so you can see there’s a mark. It would be much easier to use if the scroll wheel would go “past” the Menu option at the bottom if you keep rolling it down, and come back “around” to the top. But if you then click the scroll wheel while the cursor is aligned on the progress bar at the bottom of the screen, a new mode pops up that allows you to quickly and easily progress from one bookmark to another, forward and backward. It’s a great timesaver and something that I really appreciate; it shows that the design team really put a lot of thought into making the Kindle as powerful as possible without overwhelming the interface.
Searches on the Kindle add a new level of enjoyment to the reading experience. At any time during my reading, I can perform a search for any word or phrase, across ALL books currently stored on the Kindle. The search results screen is perfectly organized, listing the book titles in which the search text is located, along with the number of times it appears in each book as well as options to get a definition from the onboard dictionary or perform a Wikipedia or web search if the wireless function is activated. When I select a book title, all of the instances are displayed in context, with 2-3 lines of text, so I can see which one I want to choose. Once I find what I’m looking for, I can click the scroll wheel to be taken instantly to that location in the book, or I can click the Back button to be taken back to what I was reading.
Graphics
The main shortcoming of the Kindle (aside from relatively limited content availability) is the lack of support for graphics. While I really don’t miss color, I do miss the ability to view maps and charts in all their printed glory. Book covers are included for texts you purchase from the Kindle store, which is a nice touch, and the books I imported to the Kindle do include a few maps here and there. You can see them, but there is no way to resize them to be even as large as the Kindle screen, so a great deal is “lost” in the translation. This isn’t a deal-breaker to be sure, but it is an obivous area of potential improvement.You obviously can’t study art history texts on the Kindle, but even science fiction novels are often enhanced by illustrations and maps. Other electronic reader applications handle graphics in a superior manner, so perhaps this is an example of the Kindle just needing some more development rather than an actual limitation of the e-ink technology.
Conclusion/Final Thoughts
Is the Amazon Kindle the “second coming” of the book? Yes and no. The electronic book has struggled to come into its own for the last several years, be it on a PDA/computer screen or on a dedicated device such as the Kindle. The main contribution of the Kindle could very well be that Amazon’s entry into the electronic book business means that it’s time for the industry to “grow up” as it were–until this point, electronic publishing has been fragmented at best, with competing formats, bizarre pricing schemes, and a heavy predilection to science fiction and fantasy. I enjoy those genres myself, but I also appreciate the ability to get major bestsellers for $9.99 or less immediately, without having to wait a year or more; I’ve never understood why ebooks have consistently started at hardcover prices.
That isn’t to say that the Kindle doesn’t need some improvement, and I hope that the inevitable second edition will more gracefully handle graphics (it isn’t just about color), will be lighter and thinner, with rounded edges for comfort, and offer more features than the initial model. The web browser certainly needs to be enhanced, and while the music playback feature is nice, it needs significant improvement. I also found the device to be rather persnickety to charge, and often had to jiggle the power connector to ensure good contact, so I wouldn’t wake up to a dead device in the morning after a couple of days of heavy use.
Of course each individual has to make their own decision about whether or not the Kindle is right for them; reviews on Amazon’s site show that some folks hate it and send it back quickly, while others love it so much they bought units for other family members in their household (which tends to be the pattern with the Apple iPod as well). I believe that the Kindle is aimed primarily at voracious readers who don’t already have other portable devices capable of reading ebooks, such as a PDA or tablet PC. Road warriors are an obvious target as well; since they’re on the road so much, they will likely appreciate the ability to take along a whole library of books as well as reference documents and current periodicals delivered to their device daily. Other folks like me who have a PDA may want to continue with their present ebook strategy (eReader, Microsoft Reader, etc.) instead of buying a dedicated device.
Time will tell if the Kindle is a long-term winner or not, but I lean towards optimism for the platform, if not necessarily this version of the device. It has been popular enough to be constantly sold out until recently, and the $40 price drop may also invite more folks to take the plunge. I’m sticking with my PDA as an ebook reader for now, but I’ll be watching electronic publishing closely over the next while to see what happens. Love it or hate it, the Kindle signals a major change in the industry, and I can’t wait to see what happens.
