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I waited a while to post up my thoughts on the Amazon Kindle, because I wanted to allow some time for the *shiny* to wear off, and for it to become just another device I own. So it's been just about six weeks, and I think that is enough time for me to have some experience and give an initial burst of feedback. I might check in about how I feel with it near the six month mark, and then at the one year mark, to see if the experience has much changed.
One final thought, if you run into me in person, at a convention, or perhaps at one of the Garden State Horror Writers meetings and want to hold the device, and take a look at it, please go ahead and ask. I keep it with me almost all the time, and I want to let people--especially writers, editors, and others in publishing--take a few moments to see and feel what the device is like for themselves.
I'll start with a little description of what I've done with the device. I've read several short stories, as well as around six novels so far. I've purchased only one book. I have a few more that I'm planning to purchase, but I'm forcing myself to take it slow. I do need, eventually to start purchasing books to read on it, or else I'm going to only be reading free stuff. Mind you, free stuff that I've been getting is pretty awesome. Including having signed up for the Tor.com website, and they've been providing books in MobiPocket format, which means that I can download those to the Kindle for reading. (Props out to publisher TOR, and their authors for coming together to do this.) Most of what I've read has been free stuff downloaded from sites that provide basically MobiPocket editions of Project Gutenberg books. This is cool and all, but I have to say: there just might be reasons to purchase a well produced edition. Many of those free editions do not adhere to a standard of formatting that makes it exactly enjoyable to read. "Simple stuff" such as tables of contents that you can click on to go directly to the appropriate chapter, or chapters that end, and then you start the next page fresh with the new chapter at the top of the page. Those things might sound trivial. They are, until you don't have them, and you start to feel that lack. I have not purchased any newspapers (I'm not much of a newspaper reader) nor any blogs (at this time, not interested in reading blogs off the Kindle) nor any magazines. Magazines are a bit of a disappointment, since I keep hearing rustlings that there will be more offerings, including some Genre stuff in the SF/F field. Which I would probably try. I'm thinking F&SF, or Asimov's or Analog would be almost ideal, since they are in that smaller digest size now, and I wouldn't feel that much of a change in the format. I also did some random browsing around.
On the most simple level, I have to give it marks for the fact that it works. That is to say, I can start reading, and by the end of the first page of text, I'm totally sucked in, and the fact that its not paper stops mattering. Pretty much at all. I've read in bed, in a chair, on my lunch break at work, in a car (as a passenger!) in dim light, in good light. While bright and awake, while sleepy and tired. In just about every situation it feels like reading a paperback. It's got about the right size screen and the weight feels heavy enough, without being too heavy. It has some advantages that your ordinary book doesn't have, such as font resizing on the fly. Driving back from Vermont, as the day edged into dusk, I was able to keep right on reading, by ticking up the size every hour or so. It's a useful tactic to combat eyestrain, but, I feel that by the time you hit around font size 5 (for me) I'm done. The most comfortable font sizes to read, were 2, 3, and 4. Size 1 was too small except in crisp good lighting and when I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed. And I'm the kind of person who keeps his large screen on max resolution--to the extreme that I get people constantly commenting on how tiny the text is on my computer at work. Size 2 is my standard, with 3 being my close second.
I've read a lot of controversy about reading with the cover, or not with the cover, and people accidentally jumping pressing wrong buttons, etc. I just didn't find that to be a real problem. That's not to say that I never had a mishap. I've managed to accidentally page forward almost the whole way through a novel. Most of the time though, that kind of user error happened while futzing with putting the device in and out of the case, and not taking a second to activate the screen saver. In general, I find that most of these "accidents" happen when I'm playing around and not focused on reading. I also have picked up a habit of hitting next page too early. I think that I'm used to starting to flip a page, and reading the last sentence off the page as I flip. Which you can't exactly do with the Kindle. I do not, however like some others, even notice the pause between page flips. Perhaps that is due to my slow reading speed. I think the thing I do most frequently, is accidentally hit the Back button with my right thumb, when I mean to hit the Next Page button. Which seems odd, since when you look at the device, the Back button is tiny in size in comparison. It's also the thing that is more disruptive, because if you accidentally Next Page, you can quick Previous Page with your other hand. When you hit Back, it might (depending upon what you are doing) drop you out of the book entirely, or put you back to the TOC, or something else, depending upon what screen you were on before you started reading. That means, you have to use the track wheel to get back into your story. If I had to estimate though, I'd blame around 95% of the mishaps on user error, and only about 5% on the design. I find it most comfortable to hold and read outside the case. Though I can, and have, read extensively with the case on. In the case, you get a touch more of the feel like you have a book in your hands. For me that feel matters less than it might to others, so I mostly keep the case around to protect the device. I also do not seem to experience the issue that I've heard others report where the Kindle will fall out of the case, or that the back plate will come off. I've had the latter happen, but invariably, it was because I didn't secure the backplate after opening it up to access the SD car, etc.
Battery life, for the most part has been great. In fact, it's been so good, that I'll have a tendency to forget to charge it. Unlike, say my blackberry, which I charge daily, for fear of running out of juice. Now, the big difference here, is you want good battery life you have got to leave the wireless off. If you don't, even if you aren't actively using it, you will see your battery life tank fast. I'd say you'd be back to charging it daily. Now, I don't have a problem with not using the wireless until I need to. However, I missed the first deployed update when it rolled, because I hadn't used the wireless access for a good two weeks or so. Oh yeah, that was wild, having turned on the wireless, and then watching as the device just automatically performed a software upgrade and rebooted itself. Now, it doesn't do the upgrade while you are using it. It downloads the upgrade in the background, then it waits for the screen saver to kick on, indicating that you stopped using it before it starts to apply the upgrade. The upgrade itself took no more than five minutes. Had a second upgrade also happen. The fixes applied were minor from what I understand.
Capacity is fantastic. I was able to load over 100+ novels on the native memory. I never bothered to max that out to see just what the final number was. Instead I just bought a 2 GB SD card, and now have over 450 works on the device. And I think I have about 1.8 GB or so storage free. That includes, by the way, a dozen or so songs that I copied over to the device for some easy listening while I read. (A few of my George Winston CDs and a couple others.) Books, for the most part are tiny. The vast majority of them come in at under a megabyte. A few, are in the several megabyte range...the Diary of Samuel Pepys, and the Complete Works of Frederick Schiller, for example both run around 3 megabytes. I was afraid that the professional versions of books would be much larger than the Project Gutenberg ones, but so far as I can tell that is not the case. I've heard of people running out to purchase 8 GB SD cards for these things, and so far, I don't think that's going to be a necessity. I suspect that my current setup would easily get me into the thousands of books on a single device. Now, perhaps that changes with periodicals. I'm sure if you are the type to listen to audio books, you'd want more storage as those appear to take up much larger space on the device. Now carrying around all these books in one sounds great. The freedom to just pick a book and start reading it, then if that one doesn't hit your fancy at that time to be able to switch, or scan through for the exact book you are in the mood for is awesome. What is not awesome is trying to sort through the catalog. It's just one long list. Page, after page, after page, and it can only be sorted one of three ways: Most recently read first, Sorted by Author, or Sorted by Title.
That sucks.
No, no. Let me be clear and repeat that. It sucks.
Why? Because when you have 100+ titles, you aren't going to be able to sort that all in your head. And by the time you hit 500 or 1000 titles, it will overwhelm you fast. Here's the thing, allow me to tag these. Or at least let them have default categories in the meta-data. I mean, when I go to the Amazon site to buy them, they get sorted out into category, and subcategory, etc, etc. I'd like to have them in piles. If I'm in the mood to read non-fiction (such as now) I could scan through just those titles. When I'm in the mood for a Horror, I could scan through those. Now sure, I can use the built in search feature. That's useful if, for example, I don't remember the titles of all the Sherlock Holmes books I've grabbed. But it does nothing if I'm just in the mood to read a science fiction story. What do I search on? I suspect the developers did not consider that some people would actually want to walk around with thousands of books on them. I'm hoping that it will come in an upgrade. Soon. Please Amazon, give us a way to sort and organize.
The only other thing to note, and I do so with much hesitation because I have not bothered to troubleshoot the issue, is a bit of quirkiness with things on the SD card. Since I haven't done the due diligence of either switching the SD card to see if that's the cause, or calling in to tech support to troubleshoot, I can't yet hold the occasional (and only occasional) strange behavior of a book in conjunction with the SD card on the device. When I get around to tracking down the real details, I'll be sure to report the findings. It would be kind of nice if it is the card, because that is an easy fix.
Overall impression: its good, very good, but there is room for improvement. No it isn't cheap at the moment, and I suspect that the price acts as a barrier to entry for the every day user. That said, so long as you don't mind the risks of loss or theft of a device in this price range (I don't consider it any more or less so than the risks with a good cellphone or digital camera, for example), it is an ideal item for the frequent travellar. With the cover, it's about the size and weight of a trade paperback. But since it could be your newspaper, magazines, as well as novel collections, and blog reader....that's pretty impressive. Not to mention act as an in the pinch web browser/email device (so long as you have some type of webmail account.) That's not shabby. Sure, a laptop can serve you all that and more, no question. But this thing is virtually silent, and gives off no light or heat to speak of, and can literally last a week on a single charge.
I've been surprised that so far, while the writing/publishing folk I've run into are curious about it, and intrigued, that the people who have been the most impressed and intrigued by it are those I know outside that field. Granted, most of the people I know are in tech, and so perhaps they are just impressed as tech-heads. But my boss was immediately impressed, and I could see that within minutes, he not only understood the general benefits of having something like this for leisure reading on vacation, but then started to think about how neat it would be to have in an office environment where you could have lots of tech books at your disposal without cluttering up desks. The VP of IT at work looked it over, and instantly thought how useful it would be for pilots, who regularly have to carry lots of flight manuals. I admit, having a whole collection of O'Reilly books at my fingertips wouldn't exactly suck. Especially with the built in search capabilities. I wonder if corporate use wouldn't end up being a huge benefit to this market. Imagine having all kinds of vital documentation at your fingertips, searchable. And you can even mark them up, or share them with a team. Even if that team wasn't in the same location! That could be a great resource.
Lastly, I'll talk about the aesthetics of the device. There's a lot of people who ridicule it, saying it looks like something out of the 80's. You want to know what it looks like from the 80's? The Commodore. You know what? That little computer made the computer age happen. Apple, IBM, those guys couldn't hold a candle compared to what Commodore did for the information age. Those machines were everywhere, they brought the computer into virtually every home. Heck, my late 80's Amiga blew away anything that Apple had to offer at that time. You know how I can tell? Because it could run not only its own software, but Apple and PC software as well. Sure, the company crashed and burned, but it wasn't because of the product, or the aesthetics. Anyway, maybe there's a little nostalgia in the design of this thing. If they can try to bring back Knight Rider on TV, I think we're primed for a little 80's nostalgia anyway. And if this device can help usher in the general acceptance of the digital print age, the way the Commodore helped usher in the personal computing age, well, that wouldn't be a bad thing in the least.
On the most simple level, I have to give it marks for the fact that it works. That is to say, I can start reading, and by the end of the first page of text, I'm totally sucked in, and the fact that its not paper stops mattering. Pretty much at all. I've read in bed, in a chair, on my lunch break at work, in a car (as a passenger!) in dim light, in good light. While bright and awake, while sleepy and tired. In just about every situation it feels like reading a paperback. It's got about the right size screen and the weight feels heavy enough, without being too heavy. It has some advantages that your ordinary book doesn't have, such as font resizing on the fly. Driving back from Vermont, as the day edged into dusk, I was able to keep right on reading, by ticking up the size every hour or so. It's a useful tactic to combat eyestrain, but, I feel that by the time you hit around font size 5 (for me) I'm done. The most comfortable font sizes to read, were 2, 3, and 4. Size 1 was too small except in crisp good lighting and when I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed. And I'm the kind of person who keeps his large screen on max resolution--to the extreme that I get people constantly commenting on how tiny the text is on my computer at work. Size 2 is my standard, with 3 being my close second.
I've read a lot of controversy about reading with the cover, or not with the cover, and people accidentally jumping pressing wrong buttons, etc. I just didn't find that to be a real problem. That's not to say that I never had a mishap. I've managed to accidentally page forward almost the whole way through a novel. Most of the time though, that kind of user error happened while futzing with putting the device in and out of the case, and not taking a second to activate the screen saver. In general, I find that most of these "accidents" happen when I'm playing around and not focused on reading. I also have picked up a habit of hitting next page too early. I think that I'm used to starting to flip a page, and reading the last sentence off the page as I flip. Which you can't exactly do with the Kindle. I do not, however like some others, even notice the pause between page flips. Perhaps that is due to my slow reading speed. I think the thing I do most frequently, is accidentally hit the Back button with my right thumb, when I mean to hit the Next Page button. Which seems odd, since when you look at the device, the Back button is tiny in size in comparison. It's also the thing that is more disruptive, because if you accidentally Next Page, you can quick Previous Page with your other hand. When you hit Back, it might (depending upon what you are doing) drop you out of the book entirely, or put you back to the TOC, or something else, depending upon what screen you were on before you started reading. That means, you have to use the track wheel to get back into your story. If I had to estimate though, I'd blame around 95% of the mishaps on user error, and only about 5% on the design. I find it most comfortable to hold and read outside the case. Though I can, and have, read extensively with the case on. In the case, you get a touch more of the feel like you have a book in your hands. For me that feel matters less than it might to others, so I mostly keep the case around to protect the device. I also do not seem to experience the issue that I've heard others report where the Kindle will fall out of the case, or that the back plate will come off. I've had the latter happen, but invariably, it was because I didn't secure the backplate after opening it up to access the SD car, etc.
Battery life, for the most part has been great. In fact, it's been so good, that I'll have a tendency to forget to charge it. Unlike, say my blackberry, which I charge daily, for fear of running out of juice. Now, the big difference here, is you want good battery life you have got to leave the wireless off. If you don't, even if you aren't actively using it, you will see your battery life tank fast. I'd say you'd be back to charging it daily. Now, I don't have a problem with not using the wireless until I need to. However, I missed the first deployed update when it rolled, because I hadn't used the wireless access for a good two weeks or so. Oh yeah, that was wild, having turned on the wireless, and then watching as the device just automatically performed a software upgrade and rebooted itself. Now, it doesn't do the upgrade while you are using it. It downloads the upgrade in the background, then it waits for the screen saver to kick on, indicating that you stopped using it before it starts to apply the upgrade. The upgrade itself took no more than five minutes. Had a second upgrade also happen. The fixes applied were minor from what I understand.
Capacity is fantastic. I was able to load over 100+ novels on the native memory. I never bothered to max that out to see just what the final number was. Instead I just bought a 2 GB SD card, and now have over 450 works on the device. And I think I have about 1.8 GB or so storage free. That includes, by the way, a dozen or so songs that I copied over to the device for some easy listening while I read. (A few of my George Winston CDs and a couple others.) Books, for the most part are tiny. The vast majority of them come in at under a megabyte. A few, are in the several megabyte range...the Diary of Samuel Pepys, and the Complete Works of Frederick Schiller, for example both run around 3 megabytes. I was afraid that the professional versions of books would be much larger than the Project Gutenberg ones, but so far as I can tell that is not the case. I've heard of people running out to purchase 8 GB SD cards for these things, and so far, I don't think that's going to be a necessity. I suspect that my current setup would easily get me into the thousands of books on a single device. Now, perhaps that changes with periodicals. I'm sure if you are the type to listen to audio books, you'd want more storage as those appear to take up much larger space on the device. Now carrying around all these books in one sounds great. The freedom to just pick a book and start reading it, then if that one doesn't hit your fancy at that time to be able to switch, or scan through for the exact book you are in the mood for is awesome. What is not awesome is trying to sort through the catalog. It's just one long list. Page, after page, after page, and it can only be sorted one of three ways: Most recently read first, Sorted by Author, or Sorted by Title.
That sucks.
No, no. Let me be clear and repeat that. It sucks.
Why? Because when you have 100+ titles, you aren't going to be able to sort that all in your head. And by the time you hit 500 or 1000 titles, it will overwhelm you fast. Here's the thing, allow me to tag these. Or at least let them have default categories in the meta-data. I mean, when I go to the Amazon site to buy them, they get sorted out into category, and subcategory, etc, etc. I'd like to have them in piles. If I'm in the mood to read non-fiction (such as now) I could scan through just those titles. When I'm in the mood for a Horror, I could scan through those. Now sure, I can use the built in search feature. That's useful if, for example, I don't remember the titles of all the Sherlock Holmes books I've grabbed. But it does nothing if I'm just in the mood to read a science fiction story. What do I search on? I suspect the developers did not consider that some people would actually want to walk around with thousands of books on them. I'm hoping that it will come in an upgrade. Soon. Please Amazon, give us a way to sort and organize.
The only other thing to note, and I do so with much hesitation because I have not bothered to troubleshoot the issue, is a bit of quirkiness with things on the SD card. Since I haven't done the due diligence of either switching the SD card to see if that's the cause, or calling in to tech support to troubleshoot, I can't yet hold the occasional (and only occasional) strange behavior of a book in conjunction with the SD card on the device. When I get around to tracking down the real details, I'll be sure to report the findings. It would be kind of nice if it is the card, because that is an easy fix.
Overall impression: its good, very good, but there is room for improvement. No it isn't cheap at the moment, and I suspect that the price acts as a barrier to entry for the every day user. That said, so long as you don't mind the risks of loss or theft of a device in this price range (I don't consider it any more or less so than the risks with a good cellphone or digital camera, for example), it is an ideal item for the frequent travellar. With the cover, it's about the size and weight of a trade paperback. But since it could be your newspaper, magazines, as well as novel collections, and blog reader....that's pretty impressive. Not to mention act as an in the pinch web browser/email device (so long as you have some type of webmail account.) That's not shabby. Sure, a laptop can serve you all that and more, no question. But this thing is virtually silent, and gives off no light or heat to speak of, and can literally last a week on a single charge.
I've been surprised that so far, while the writing/publishing folk I've run into are curious about it, and intrigued, that the people who have been the most impressed and intrigued by it are those I know outside that field. Granted, most of the people I know are in tech, and so perhaps they are just impressed as tech-heads. But my boss was immediately impressed, and I could see that within minutes, he not only understood the general benefits of having something like this for leisure reading on vacation, but then started to think about how neat it would be to have in an office environment where you could have lots of tech books at your disposal without cluttering up desks. The VP of IT at work looked it over, and instantly thought how useful it would be for pilots, who regularly have to carry lots of flight manuals. I admit, having a whole collection of O'Reilly books at my fingertips wouldn't exactly suck. Especially with the built in search capabilities. I wonder if corporate use wouldn't end up being a huge benefit to this market. Imagine having all kinds of vital documentation at your fingertips, searchable. And you can even mark them up, or share them with a team. Even if that team wasn't in the same location! That could be a great resource.
Lastly, I'll talk about the aesthetics of the device. There's a lot of people who ridicule it, saying it looks like something out of the 80's. You want to know what it looks like from the 80's? The Commodore. You know what? That little computer made the computer age happen. Apple, IBM, those guys couldn't hold a candle compared to what Commodore did for the information age. Those machines were everywhere, they brought the computer into virtually every home. Heck, my late 80's Amiga blew away anything that Apple had to offer at that time. You know how I can tell? Because it could run not only its own software, but Apple and PC software as well. Sure, the company crashed and burned, but it wasn't because of the product, or the aesthetics. Anyway, maybe there's a little nostalgia in the design of this thing. If they can try to bring back Knight Rider on TV, I think we're primed for a little 80's nostalgia anyway. And if this device can help usher in the general acceptance of the digital print age, the way the Commodore helped usher in the personal computing age, well, that wouldn't be a bad thing in the least.
One final thought, if you run into me in person, at a convention, or perhaps at one of the Garden State Horror Writers meetings and want to hold the device, and take a look at it, please go ahead and ask. I keep it with me almost all the time, and I want to let people--especially writers, editors, and others in publishing--take a few moments to see and feel what the device is like for themselves.
