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Yes, I'm a major advocate of the Kindle, having been excited about the concept of eInk from the first day I heard about it a good half a decade ago now, long before any practical eReader based upon its technology was ready for the public sphere. I still think that as a concept, both environmentally, and ergonomically, having a dedicated device with an eInk screen for reading text is virtually as good as reading an actual paper book. However, I know that not everyone wants to shell out the big bucks (at this time) to get an eReader. And truth be told, I knew I was an early adopter going in. There'd be a risk that I was making a bad choice, and the devices would flop, and it would be another ten years before eReaders had another go. Something I know from personal experience is this: you only have to get burned once by a piece of technology to get bitter and resentful.
An example is the time we implemented a Lotus Domino feature called Shared Mail. The purpose was to save space on your systems, by storing only a single copy of any email that had multiple recipients, and then giving only pointers to the mail file of those users who were addressed in the message. Well, all the testing went well, and we were starting to roll it out big time, and then the main repository that had all those emails in it got corrupted, and we nearly lost a ton of emails all in one fell swoop. That was in the 90's. You bring up the words "Shared Mail" in my department, and you will still to this day hear major groans. And we're not alone by a long shot. In fact, whenever Lotus brings out a new feature that even remotely sounds like Shared Mail, admins around the world all collectively groan. Once bitten,twice thrice shy.
So this whole ebook technology is a big risk. People love it. They hate it. Some will probably treat it much like Shared Mail. Others will consider it the newest indispensible tech. But among the biggest reasons I hear people complain about these new readers are these two: what if company X or Y stops supporting that hardware. How will I continue to read the books I paid for--and--why should I buy a device in that price range, when I can get a netbook for about the same cash, and get all the features of a full fledged computer.
The answer to both those questions is this: you can. Both Barnes and Noble, and now Amazon, make software you can install on your PC that will let you read the same books you can download on your Nook or Kindle on a PC. You register your install with your account, and voila: PC becomes in effect an eReader. In both these instances if you purchase a book on your account, you can read it on either a ereader or your PC, even on both at the same time.
So I decided, what the heck, let's take a download of both items and check them out. Here's my brief impressions:
B&N. This software was out first to market, so I'll place it first in the list.
The first thing I'll note, is that after the install, this software hung on me the first few times I ran it. I'm not sure why. After a full PC reboot, it worked okay, and I haven't seen too much more of a problem. It's not a bad bit of software. You can download your stuff from your online library. You can shop for new purchases (which opens up a browser right to the B&N site, in the ebooks) You can see what's on your PC, you can see what's available in your online library, the repository of your purchases. I assume these would also be available to your Nook, if you owned one. You can search, you can sort, and thankfully, you can ORGANIZE. The software allows you to define your own "shelves" and place books in various locations. A neat perk, is that when you install the software, you get a couple of books from B&N for free. They are classics, and you could just as easily obtain the same works through free sites like Project Gutenberg, but these are the actual Barnes and Noble Classics editions, including all the commentary and extra notes you can get if you purchase those editions. (I have a sizable collection, and I compared the notes for the books I was given against them, and thus far they are identical.) When it comes to the reading experience itself, you have the option of two page mode, so it looks more like a regular book. Navigation works via mouse scroll wheel, or the space bar or arrows. Simple. You have a lot of control over the text presentation settings. You can give it different background textures, font choices, text colors, etc. But it all pops up in its own window, and you can fiddle with it to your heart's content, and then even save settings so you can reuse them elsewhere. I find this way of changing text, particularly for size, annoying. You have to know what point size you want your text in. And you have to manually type it in. There's no nice selection like you get in MS word of the common font sizes with the option to get more specific. It also has two special reading modes. These two only work in single page mode (which makes a certain amount of sense.) The first is autoscroll. It scrolls the text on by, at a pace you can select. Neat so you can just turn it on, sit back, and don't have to lift a finger. Kind of feels like reading the intros to Star Wars. And I found it annoying that you can't pause it just anywhere. Well, you can, but it snaps to the full page. So if you didn't manage to flip the counter to the next page and you pause, it jumps back to the beginning of the page. Bleh. Next up is what they call RSVP mode. Another one of these read the text without having to move ideas. Here you get a tiny window at the top of the page, and it shows small snippets of the text so at a metered pace so that you can read them. Meh. They seem to think it's useful when screen size is small. I guess. Perhaps if you were reading on your iPhone or Blackberry (they have versions of the same app for both devices) this would be useful. Even for a netbook, I find it hard to believe this is worth it.
Overall, a decent bit of software. My chief complaint is that it seems buggy. It crashed several times as I was just writing up this review, and flipping back and forth to examine and test the features. That's not a great sign. And I really don't love the way they handle the text. It's nice to have a broad range of flexibility, but too much choice, and a less than great interface to those options makes it clunky. Still, how often are you to change your text size in the middle of things? I figure most folks find a text size they are comfortable with, and just stick with it.
Kindle for PC: My immediate impression of this software was that it was rushed to market. I think the competition of the PC version for B&N plus the new Nook forced the issue here, though of course I could be wrong. I did find it strange that I'd neither heard nor seen a hint of this coming down the pike until after the Nook was announced. I find the app lacking in features and most importantly, you still can't organize a damn thing. Come on. Really? Get it together Amazon. Give us folders. Give us other options to organize our books. You seem to be under the illusion that it's easy to navigate, and with maybe 5-10 books at once, it's no big deal. Get past 20 and you're going to want to be able to keep things better organized. Heaven forfend if we might possibly get the option to tag our own books, so that we can search based upon our own tags or something. Sorry about that. Look, this is basically like using the Kindle itself. Your options here are somewhat limited, but on the other hand it does what it does, does it smoothly and well, and is quick to launch, run, and get reading. The reading experience is more like reading on the Kindle, and is only in single page mode. It doesn't use page numbers, it still uses locations, because you can on the fly adjust the text size easily. This is the good feature they kept in that you don't have to think. Your text sizes are there, and on a nice sliding bar, and you just select the one you want and there you go. Where I feel this software is most lacking, is in trying to do anything more than the most basic of stuff from the Kindle. Nor do they seem to be trying to take any advantage of being on a PC instead of the dedicated device. A tad disappointing, but again, I think they rushed this out the door to keep up with B&N. Yeah. Not great, but it's free. It syncs with your Kindle, including your saved locations, and that's neat. But mostly, it's okay. It does seem overall more stable than the B&N app, which is a good thing. Not going to get excited by it anything soon, though.
If I had to give out grades, I'd give the B&N app a B and the Kindle app a C. Neither is perfect, or awesome. Both allow you to take notes, bookmark, and highlight text. Both allow you to search, etc. They also both give you an additional option for reading your purchased ebooks from these two vendors. You can, if you have the correct format, also add in your own downloaded content from elsewhere to your reading list. Nice. In this instance, neither seems to handle PDF, but frankly, why bother. If you're on a PC, just get Adobe reader.
Lastly, I think these are fine, especially as addendums to the main product line of dedicated eReaders. And if you like the screen, and don't mind it, go for it. Download them yourself, and try them out. They're FREE afterall. Both are nice ways to dip your foot into the ebook market. But in my opinion, neither replace a nice, dedicated eInk device. I'm afraid if I'm on my PC, I'd be too tempted to check email and twitter, and LJ, and...you get the point.
And really, truly, lastly, if you do get this kind of software remember, you'll want to back up the books you download/purchase. Because you just never know, and after all, as today is Wednesday BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!
An example is the time we implemented a Lotus Domino feature called Shared Mail. The purpose was to save space on your systems, by storing only a single copy of any email that had multiple recipients, and then giving only pointers to the mail file of those users who were addressed in the message. Well, all the testing went well, and we were starting to roll it out big time, and then the main repository that had all those emails in it got corrupted, and we nearly lost a ton of emails all in one fell swoop. That was in the 90's. You bring up the words "Shared Mail" in my department, and you will still to this day hear major groans. And we're not alone by a long shot. In fact, whenever Lotus brings out a new feature that even remotely sounds like Shared Mail, admins around the world all collectively groan. Once bitten,
So this whole ebook technology is a big risk. People love it. They hate it. Some will probably treat it much like Shared Mail. Others will consider it the newest indispensible tech. But among the biggest reasons I hear people complain about these new readers are these two: what if company X or Y stops supporting that hardware. How will I continue to read the books I paid for--and--why should I buy a device in that price range, when I can get a netbook for about the same cash, and get all the features of a full fledged computer.
The answer to both those questions is this: you can. Both Barnes and Noble, and now Amazon, make software you can install on your PC that will let you read the same books you can download on your Nook or Kindle on a PC. You register your install with your account, and voila: PC becomes in effect an eReader. In both these instances if you purchase a book on your account, you can read it on either a ereader or your PC, even on both at the same time.
So I decided, what the heck, let's take a download of both items and check them out. Here's my brief impressions:
B&N. This software was out first to market, so I'll place it first in the list.
The first thing I'll note, is that after the install, this software hung on me the first few times I ran it. I'm not sure why. After a full PC reboot, it worked okay, and I haven't seen too much more of a problem. It's not a bad bit of software. You can download your stuff from your online library. You can shop for new purchases (which opens up a browser right to the B&N site, in the ebooks) You can see what's on your PC, you can see what's available in your online library, the repository of your purchases. I assume these would also be available to your Nook, if you owned one. You can search, you can sort, and thankfully, you can ORGANIZE. The software allows you to define your own "shelves" and place books in various locations. A neat perk, is that when you install the software, you get a couple of books from B&N for free. They are classics, and you could just as easily obtain the same works through free sites like Project Gutenberg, but these are the actual Barnes and Noble Classics editions, including all the commentary and extra notes you can get if you purchase those editions. (I have a sizable collection, and I compared the notes for the books I was given against them, and thus far they are identical.) When it comes to the reading experience itself, you have the option of two page mode, so it looks more like a regular book. Navigation works via mouse scroll wheel, or the space bar or arrows. Simple. You have a lot of control over the text presentation settings. You can give it different background textures, font choices, text colors, etc. But it all pops up in its own window, and you can fiddle with it to your heart's content, and then even save settings so you can reuse them elsewhere. I find this way of changing text, particularly for size, annoying. You have to know what point size you want your text in. And you have to manually type it in. There's no nice selection like you get in MS word of the common font sizes with the option to get more specific. It also has two special reading modes. These two only work in single page mode (which makes a certain amount of sense.) The first is autoscroll. It scrolls the text on by, at a pace you can select. Neat so you can just turn it on, sit back, and don't have to lift a finger. Kind of feels like reading the intros to Star Wars. And I found it annoying that you can't pause it just anywhere. Well, you can, but it snaps to the full page. So if you didn't manage to flip the counter to the next page and you pause, it jumps back to the beginning of the page. Bleh. Next up is what they call RSVP mode. Another one of these read the text without having to move ideas. Here you get a tiny window at the top of the page, and it shows small snippets of the text so at a metered pace so that you can read them. Meh. They seem to think it's useful when screen size is small. I guess. Perhaps if you were reading on your iPhone or Blackberry (they have versions of the same app for both devices) this would be useful. Even for a netbook, I find it hard to believe this is worth it.
Overall, a decent bit of software. My chief complaint is that it seems buggy. It crashed several times as I was just writing up this review, and flipping back and forth to examine and test the features. That's not a great sign. And I really don't love the way they handle the text. It's nice to have a broad range of flexibility, but too much choice, and a less than great interface to those options makes it clunky. Still, how often are you to change your text size in the middle of things? I figure most folks find a text size they are comfortable with, and just stick with it.
Kindle for PC: My immediate impression of this software was that it was rushed to market. I think the competition of the PC version for B&N plus the new Nook forced the issue here, though of course I could be wrong. I did find it strange that I'd neither heard nor seen a hint of this coming down the pike until after the Nook was announced. I find the app lacking in features and most importantly, you still can't organize a damn thing. Come on. Really? Get it together Amazon. Give us folders. Give us other options to organize our books. You seem to be under the illusion that it's easy to navigate, and with maybe 5-10 books at once, it's no big deal. Get past 20 and you're going to want to be able to keep things better organized. Heaven forfend if we might possibly get the option to tag our own books, so that we can search based upon our own tags or something. Sorry about that. Look, this is basically like using the Kindle itself. Your options here are somewhat limited, but on the other hand it does what it does, does it smoothly and well, and is quick to launch, run, and get reading. The reading experience is more like reading on the Kindle, and is only in single page mode. It doesn't use page numbers, it still uses locations, because you can on the fly adjust the text size easily. This is the good feature they kept in that you don't have to think. Your text sizes are there, and on a nice sliding bar, and you just select the one you want and there you go. Where I feel this software is most lacking, is in trying to do anything more than the most basic of stuff from the Kindle. Nor do they seem to be trying to take any advantage of being on a PC instead of the dedicated device. A tad disappointing, but again, I think they rushed this out the door to keep up with B&N. Yeah. Not great, but it's free. It syncs with your Kindle, including your saved locations, and that's neat. But mostly, it's okay. It does seem overall more stable than the B&N app, which is a good thing. Not going to get excited by it anything soon, though.
If I had to give out grades, I'd give the B&N app a B and the Kindle app a C. Neither is perfect, or awesome. Both allow you to take notes, bookmark, and highlight text. Both allow you to search, etc. They also both give you an additional option for reading your purchased ebooks from these two vendors. You can, if you have the correct format, also add in your own downloaded content from elsewhere to your reading list. Nice. In this instance, neither seems to handle PDF, but frankly, why bother. If you're on a PC, just get Adobe reader.
Lastly, I think these are fine, especially as addendums to the main product line of dedicated eReaders. And if you like the screen, and don't mind it, go for it. Download them yourself, and try them out. They're FREE afterall. Both are nice ways to dip your foot into the ebook market. But in my opinion, neither replace a nice, dedicated eInk device. I'm afraid if I'm on my PC, I'd be too tempted to check email and twitter, and LJ, and...you get the point.
And really, truly, lastly, if you do get this kind of software remember, you'll want to back up the books you download/purchase. Because you just never know, and after all, as today is Wednesday BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!
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