Two Weeks with Kindle

I’ve had almost two weeks with my Kindle 2, and I’ve had friends and other coffee shop strangers asking me what I thought of it. After going through my spiel a few times, I figured it might be worth capturing my thoughts in one place.

The Good:

• I’ve rediscovered my love of reading, and have read significantly more since I got the Kindle. This may partially be due to “new toy” syndrome, but I have read three books on it in just the last week – and intend to continue.
• The Kindle’s e-ink screen is fantastic. The text resolution is sharp, and the contrast makes the text very legible and easy on the eyes. Anyone who struggles with the idea of reading a book on a “screen” really needs to try a Kindle hands-on before committing to an opinion. Trust me, the experience is very different than reading on a laptop screen.
• Another positive facet that’s rarely commented on is that the Kindle’s design and controls facilitate reading in different positions. The Kindle is basically a tablet with page advance buttons on either edge. Because of this I can hold it in either hand, lean it against a tea pot, or put it on top of the elliptical trainer and just read, without having to worry about flipping pages and perhaps breaking the spine of the book (which can happen when you place a paperback in a plastic book/magazine holder at the gym). I’ve found that the simple fact of not needing to keep a book’s pages spread open while reading is surprisingly compelling.
• The ability to continue reading a purchased book on the recently-released Kindle iphone application is handy. “Whispersync” (the functionality that synchronizes your book and your position within it) really makes it easy to read a couple of pages while killing fifteen minutes in line. However, it’s not perfect, which I’ll hit on in the next section.
• Bundled wireless access is handy, and the ability to browse, purchase, and instantly begin reading a new book is extremely well done and addictive. The ability to browse Wikipedia is appreciated as well.
• It’s a great conversation starter! I was tempted to put this in the “bad” column since it can get a tich annoying answering questions from random passers-by… but really, it’s been great seeing how many people are really interested in the device. Several stated they’d buy one after playing with mine. Of course, I live in Seattle, one of the most well-read cities in the US, so that may help. (I’d love to get access to Amazon’s internal sales data to see if there’s any correlation between literate cities and/or education and Kindle sales.)

The Bad:

• Newspaper pricing is too high. A subscription to the print New York Times is about $13 a week; the New York Times Kindle edition is about $13 a month. The problem is that the Kindle edition is simply bundling content that’s already available on the web for free – and unfortunately, it’s not even all of the content. Articles are missing, and charts and graphs simply don’t exist. That said, the experience of reading the actual text of the paper on the Kindle is good – I’m willing to pay a little for the ability to have the paper delivered to me each morning, and the slick navigation of the content. It’s just not $13 good. Make it $5 a month and they’d have a winner – as it is, I’ll be cancelling my trial subscription.
• Kindle currently charges you about $2 a month to send you blogs. Yes, blogs – like the ones you visit every day, including this one. I’m guessing the thinking is that you don’t need to manually surf over to the website on your Kindle, or that you don’t have a laptop, cell phone, RSS reader, or other device to read that content. Unfortunately that’s not the case for most people and this just feels like nickel and diming. I can justify paying a small amount for a high-quality, well-formatted newspaper such as the New York Times; I can’t justify paying for what is literally a repackaged RSS stream.
• Speaking of nickel and diming: the fact that Amazon no longer includes a cover with the purchase of their $360 device is offensive. No one buys a portable device like this without a cover, and as such the “real” price of the Kindle 2 was just bumped up by about $30. It’s a hidden tax, made all the more obvious by the fact that the first Kindle included a cover.
  One other nit – although the new cover fasteners are appreciated, Amazon should really include a large piece of double-sided tape so you can stick the back of the Kindle to the rear cover. Without it, you often grab just the back cover, and not the Kindle, when closing the whole thing.
• Kindle battery life isn’t quite where I’d like it to be. It’s great if you turn off the wireless – I’ve read that you can go almost two weeks in that case. Unfortunately, part of the allure of the Kindle is the ability to synchronize your reading across devices, shop for books, and (if you’ve chosen to subscribe to newspapers, blogs, or magazines), receive updates as they’re published. Unfortunately if you leave the wireless on you get about 3-4 days. That puts the device into the uncomfortable position of “I’d better plug it in each night so I always have enough power for the next couple of days and don’t run out.” You just don’t want to think about this sort of thing for a “book.”
• Whispersync doesn’t support any non-Amazon purchased books, nor newspapers, magazines, or blogs. It currently only supports Amazon-purchased (read DRMed) books. So if I choose to download a public domain, non-DRM version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to read on my Kindle, I can’t take advantage of the Kindle iphone application to read a few pages in line like I can other, purchased books. I can imagine a justification might be that Amazon doesn’t want to pay to send books that they don’t derive revenue from. If so, let me manually upload a book to Amazon from my desktop. I’d even be happy to manually put the book on all my Whispersync-enabled reading devices by hand – but let me use the feature!
• This is a minor, yet ironic, nit: the Kindle’s finish just absorbs newspaper ink. After reading the paper I had literal finger prints all over the device, and the texture is such that they’re quite hard to remove. Maybe this is self-solving at the rate newspapers are going out of business, but still worth noting.

The Ugly: 

• Simply put, Amazon purchased books are wrapped in a proprietary DRM format. The base book format Amazon uses is .MOBI (also known as .PRC); Amazon has added a proprietary layer of DRM to that .MOBI format to create their .AZW format. I have no problem purchasing content, but I expect to be able to use that content on future devices which may or may not be from Amazon. (This is also the same reason I refused to purchase music from iTunes until they went DRMless.) Your opinion may vary, but this is probably the most aggravating aspect of the Kindle that exists today.

Opportunities:

I’ll wrap up by noting some interesting opportunities I’d hope Amazon might consider in the future.

• Let users leverage the wireless aspect a bit more and enable free RSS feed deliveries. Sites such as Feedbooks.com and Kindlefeeder.com do this today, but it’s not as streamlined as it should be. Integrate this functionality into the existing Amazon website and you have a winner.
• Think about integrating with social network sites such as Good Reads.com. I love seeing what books my friends are reading and glean many r
  eading ideas from their activity (and vice-versa).
• Work to improve newspaper capabilities. Add the ability to include charts, graphs, images, etc. Work to find a reasonable pricing model that fits the material being delivered (suggestion: $5-8 dollars a month for a high-quality newspaper such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal). Related, think about larger versions of the Kindle that could better replicate the newspaper experience – a screen the size of a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of paper would be a great start. Color is also needed at some point (to display those charts/graphs as originally rendered).

So, enough yapping on my part. Overall, I love my Kindle, and highly recommend it to anyone who is curious. Just be careful that the DRMed book aspect doesn’t bite you when you don’t expect it. But if you’re willing to live with the limitations, it’s highly recommended.

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2. A Better Kindle 2 Cover
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5. Wireless Power Transmission Becoming Viable?