About the time the iTablet rumors were really heating up I briefly flirted with buying a Kindle. I tried to rationalize it out in my favor: it makes sense to spend $300 some-odd dollars on a device that only does one thing decently well—reading, that is, which is something that I don’t do as much as I should. After browsing various e-readers available at retailers, namely a few Sony offerings which had e-ink screens that looked kind of lousy and the refresh on them seemed to make my eyes scramble frantically for a second for some sort of visual anchor that comes half a second too slow, I found e-readers wanting and didn’t buy a Kindle.
Instead I spent about $40 on books from Amazon which I still haven’t read. I got half way through one of the four or five (the one that cost only $2) but since then I haven’t picked them up. They’re just not around when I want to read, and when I do want to read I’m just not in the mood for those books, you know? It’s been months since I’ve done any real reading.
When I got my iPad, I pretty much assumed I wasn’t going to read books on the thing. I downloaded iBooks anyway, just to check it out, and of course the interface is garish and the static book pages motif hurts my brain and all that, but it didn’t look like it’d be too hard to read a book on the thing. Eventually I grabbed the Kindle app, and I was impressed with how easy it was to ‘buy’ free books and have them show up on the app nearly instantly.
I stumbled across Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero—one of my favorite books, and sent the sample (another very nice Kindle thing that thoroughly replicates the act of checking the book out in the store… and if you didn’t know, if you hit the ToC you can check out the start of every chapter I think) to my Kindle app. Before long, I impulse purchased the whole book and started reading it on Kindle for iPad.
Then the Kindle for Android app came out and I put it on my Nexus One. The Nexus One’s much sharper screen made me realize how awful text is on the iPad. It’s one of those things you don’t notice until you see something better. Even though my eyes always felt a little strained reading the 50 or so pages of text I did on it, I didn’t realize the extremely low DPI of the iPad made text look like garbage. You only need to be a foot or so away from the iPad to see the pixels on that screen.
(This is not to bag on the iPad screen, which is very nice for all sorts of stuff that isn’t text, but it is 1024×768 stretched across 9 or more inches of screen. On top of that I swear there are miniscule gaps between the pixels, which makes text look even blurrier.)
Luckily at about this time I stumbled across the Kindle display at Target and I saw the little demo unit running. I was disappointed that it wasn’t fully functioning (I guess that wouldn’t make sense) but I was impressed by a few things: You really can’t see any ‘pixels’ (and I guess that’s because there aren’t any). It really looks like text on a page when you look at it closely. The screen ‘flash’ refresh rate was much quicker than any other e-reader I had seen in a store. When I picked it up, it was very light (my iPad feels like a brick pancake in comparison). I was pretty impressed, but with an iPad and a Nexus One, did I really need a Kindle as well?
Meanwhile, the Kindle Whispernet service was pretty much flooring me: I’d since purchased another book, How Pleasure Works, and been reading it between my Nexus One (on the toilet or on lunch at work, to be honest) or my iPad (lying in bed at home, on the toilet) and really liked how when I loaded up a book on my iPad it would say “You’ve read up to a further location on your Nexus One, do you want to jump there?” and it would just take me there. Automatic cross-platform bookmarks blew my mind. It became pretty clear to me at this point that the Kindle service was the future. More futuristic, at least, than any other offering from a US company right now (see, I’m excluding Spotify there). Books, filled with your bookmarks and notes, in the cloud.
Then, even luckier, Barnes & Noble dropped the price on the Nook and the Kindle dropped theirs even lower. It was obvious what had to happen: I had to buy a Kindle. The iPad makes my eyes hurt, and when I carry it with me places I am pretty much always worried someone is going to mug me for it. No one is going to jack a Kindle. “I’m gonna read your books fool, give up the Kindle!” Not going to happen. So, of course, I bought a Kindle.
I was a little worried, to be honest. The iPad, I was pretty sure I was going to like, so when I bought it there was no anxiety that I’d experience buyers remorse. The Kindle, however, I was worried that I wouldn’t like the refresh page flash, or that the text wouldn’t feel natural enough. To cut it all short, though, I’ll say this: I’ve got pretty much a giant hard-on for the Kindle now.
There’s a lot I love about it, but it’s all really namely about the screen. I don’t know what kind of black magic baby murdering voodoo they had to do to make this screen so awesome, but it’s incredible. It really does look like text on a page. When you take it outside, it looks even more like the page of a book. When I’m reading naturally, the screen refresh takes about the same amount of time as it takes for my eyes to jump to the top of the next page. If anything it’s a couple milliseconds slower than that, but never anything distracting. My eye movement masks it almost entirely.
I thought the keyboard would be a distraction or get in the way, but the keyboard is actually pretty useful because if you just set the Kindle on your lap while sitting or in bed, it moves the ‘page’ up to a higher position so it’s easier to read. I thought the screen would seem a little small after using the iPad for reading, but I think the smaller screen is easier to read now, but that might just be virtue of the e-Ink effecting my general perception of this entire device.
Really, aside from the fact that the device really nails the reading experience, my other favorite thing is the only other thing it really ‘does’, and that’s displaying author portraits and various arty images on the sleep screen. E-Ink is cool in that doesn’t need power to hold an image; once an image it on the screen it’s just there, so when you put the Kindle to sleep it flashes up a picture of James Joyce or Agatha Christie or a bunch of butterflies. The images are beautiful on the e-Ink screen, and it just simply makes the device look so much more interesting.
When I was in elementary school I was in an art program that was for gifted students. I’m still not sure if gifted meant smart or retarded because while all of us were very intelligent I think we were all socially incompetent even at such a young age. Regardless, the woman who ran the library ran the art program and her name was Teddy. I don’t remember her last name, but she looked like the type of woman who lived her life to sell art. I don’t know if she did, maybe she did, but she was in her 50′s and she just had that feel, you know, like, “old woman who takes art seriously and goes to operas and shit”.
The Kindle feels like a device she would carry proudly, especially if it displayed more fine art on the sleep screen. It really feels like it was built by reading snobs, for reading snobs, and I appreciate that. It’s actually rekindled my passion for reading. I haven’t bought a ton of books, but a reasonable amount that I’m sure to read. The Kindle will travel with me everywhere, and I got to say, it’s pretty fucking exciting to live in a future where I have a fucking electric book that has tons of books in it, and thousands more available on demand, wherever I am.
Miscellaneous Notes
Holy shit, I spelled Miscellaneous right on the first try. I am a goddamn genius.
Complaints? I wish you could hide the title bar and the lower bar area that shows your progress. I’d rather not know my progress, like on Kindle for iPad, unless I manually choose to. Maybe this is a feature I haven’t found yet, but they could squeeze an extra three lines of text onto the screen at my preferred font size if they ditched the always on superfluous title bar and progress bar.
The on demand full book search that I haven’t used is an attractive feature, but really even better is the Wikipedia search using the built in rudimentary browser. The free forever-3G built into this thing is an incredible thing, and last night even though I had an iPad and a Nexus One a foot away, I used my Kindle, which was already in my hands, to look up something on Wikipedia—in part because reading on it is so much more comfortable than the LED and AMOLED screens.
Probably because of how light the Kindle is, it feels kind of cheap. Not flimsy like I could easily break it (because it feels durable enough, might get a case though), but just cheap. For $200 it was kind of cheap, so I can’t say it matters. It is riddled with tiny little design flaws, like one of my Next Page buttons sticks out a little further than the Home button it’s adjacent to. There’s a similar thing on the back where the plastic antenna covering isn’t flush with the metal back. These are just things that Steve Jobs would nit-pick to death, not things that matter in reality, though.
The little keyboard buttons are god awful. It’s pretty clear you’re not meant to type anything beyond a couple words at a time on this thing, but that’s fine ’cause you never really need to type more than a couple words.
The ‘My Clips’ feature is nice. I have yet to pull my clips file off the Kindle onto my PC and pull all my notes and highlights. It’s a shame there isn’t yet a social network aspect to it—you can already see how many people highlighted a specific passage, but you can’t see their notes. How interesting will it be when (this must be an inevitability) you can have discussions with people within highlights? Ideally it will be brutally moderated to assure no asshats participate—perhaps limit all non-Kindles to read-only mode so only Kindle proper owners can participate. It’s elitist but reading is elitist so fuck off.
I use my iPad less, now, since I’m reading more. This has turned the iPad into what it really is: an anti-boredom brain killing media consuming device. Not to sound negative, because my iPad is the best gaming and web browsing and music listening and video watching (kinda) device in existence and using it is a dream. But it sucks for reading, which is pretty much the most educational and mind-expanding activity in the whole world. The one thing that it does poorly is the one thing the Kindle does perfectly. Weird, that.
I have not looked into the whole ‘stealing books’ things, because as a hobbist writer it would make me feel like a tremendous dick to steal some shit. I’m sure eventually I’ll look into it, though, because I am a tremendous dick.
I guess I’m a gadget slut, but it speaks volumes of positive hyperbole that I can read my Kindle books on my PC, my Nexus One, my iPad, and my Kindle and it doesn’t cost me anything more than the $9.99 the book cost. Sure, it’s not a physical book, and I can’t lend it to anyone—but every time I’ve ever lent one of my books to anyone they’ve always returned it practically ruined and nearly unreadable, so am I really going to miss the experience of lending physical books to people? No. No I am not. I will gladly pay $5 to $10 less for a book and lose the ability to have someone else destroy it for me.
I <3 Kindle.