So I've been waiting a decade or so for this thing. I grew up in an area far from easy access to books, and I was a voracious reader. After one point, appreciated presents almost entirely boiled down to new reading matter. Sure toys were great, but books were awesome. In the afterglow that was finishing a good book, I regularly fantasized about a magical book that I could command to show me any book I could think up. In that pre internet era, it was a pain just looking up the rest of an author's work, leave alone actually getting my hands on it.
So here now is the Kindle: an absurdly light, comfortable, easy to use little panel that can call up any one of 90000 books and growing. Sure, it's powered by money instead of magic, and it's surprisingly hideous to first glance, but it works. Damnit, it WORKS.
I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but the pent up lust I have for what this device promises was so strong that I put cash down first thing Monday morning. I practically ripped the packaging apart to get to it, and I'm happy to say that it's a bloody great toy.
The screen is wonderful, and a little magical. It is very comfortable to read off of, and the bizzarely physical nature of its rendering is a fun novelty. It's weird to think of it actually physically moving little elements around to form the picture. It's still all very first gen feeling: the refresh rate is awful, and the colors (think dark graphite pencil on newspaper stock) are clearly the only thing the technology supports, rather than a conscious design choice. But it WORKS.
Speaking of design, the thing is absolutely as hideous as the pictures make it out to be. It looks like a 10 minute quickie prop from a half discarded Buck Rogers episode. There's no defending the thing's looks, from its abundance of gawky angles to its flair-fallen-flat kooky keyboard. Gods willing, Amazon are already on a complete redesign of the form of the thing. But again: it works. The UI is limited by the screen's refresh rate, but they've done a great job compensating for that with the cool mercury slider bar. The giant page forward and backwards buttons are perfectly positioned for me, and the keyboard is quite serviceable for the uses its put to. It's also a lot smaller than the pictures make it out to be.
Book vs Kindle then.
- Instant on: I can pick up a book at any point and thumb right over to where I left off. I routinely just walk away from a book to answer the phone, or the door, or to greet friends walking by, and so on. I've tried reading on my tablet PC, which fails miserably here. I'm always aware of battery life, and am very much in the habit of remembering to put it to sleep if I think I'm going to be away from it for a time, leading to a wake up wait the next time I want to pick it up. The Kindle on the other hand, I have no such qualms about. I've been using it for days without charging it up (keeping the radio off most of the time), and walking away from it is a non issue: it takes no power unless it's actually rendering a new page. Verdict: Tie.
- Easy on the eyes: Books are a reflective tech. They rely on ambient light and therefore naturally match the contrast of the rest of your environment, meaning that your eyes don't have to adjust much to look at it. I certainly find far less strain from reading a book than from working on a PC for hours. Laptops, Tablets, iPhones, etc, all suffer the same sort of problem. The Kindle's screen is also reflective, and so as comfortable as a book. As a bonus, when my eyes are feeling a little tired, I can zoom in on the text and read with a larger font for a while. Verdict: Kindle wins by a slim margin.
- Reading Comfort: Books are pretty small, light things that are easy to hold in one hand and therefore lend themselves to being used in all manner of comfortable positions. Curled up on the couch, lying in bed, lounging by the pool. My Tablet PC can do some of this, but it's just plain too bulky and heavy to lend its self to the one handed thing. The Kindle is as light or lighter than your average paperback, and about the same size. It's more than easy to hold while reading and has the added bonus of being always flat unlike the sometimes unruly curling pages of a book. No more annoying shadow creeping up from the spine if you fail to hold the book open far enough, no wind blowing pages over, no annoying imbalance in weight when you're at the head or the tail of a book. It's also the same size and weight no matter what size the book. No more struggling with that giant space opera epic at the breakfast table! Verdict: Kindle totally wins.
- Price: The Kindle is WAY too expensive. I bought one, but I'm a nerd. If this is going to sell to everyone in the Oprah book club, it needs to be more like $100. Heck, if it was $50 and sold at airports, Amazon wouldn't be able to manufacture enough to keep shelves stocked for years to come. The actual e-books themselves are decently priced; I've bought a half dozen so far and none have been more than $6. That's absolutely fine with me. But the giant outlay here means books win this battle by a comfortable mile.
- Convenience: I've moved around a lot in my life. The combination of being a nutcase reader and a nomad has meant that I've abandoned stacks upon stacks of books to charities, old boyfriends and (in the case of particularly dire books) the local landfill. On occasion I've almost wept at the separation; there was this one particular move after the period where I'd discovered Heinlein where I had to get rid of his entire body of work. Just plain ouch. Sure Amazon won't be here forever, and there's some chance that my collection will get bricked at some point, but they've been in business at least 3 times longer than the longest I've managed to hold onto all but a literal handful of books. Kindle pwns this one.
- Accessibility. Books have become a hell of a lot easier to get at then when I was a kid. Even rare books are relatively easy to find online. The Kindle still has a limited supply of titles, but with Amazon behind it I have faith that more will pour in. I mean, if Amazon can't do it, no one can. Books that are available are absurdly easy to get at. The built in store is a thing of beauty, and already I've ended one book only to desperately bash at the keys to get my next fix from the same author (Neil Gaiman in this case. I hadn't read Anansi Boys yet, and segued into previously unknown to me Coraline). Less than 5 minutes I think it was, and I was sitting in a cafe to boot. I think 8 year old me wants the now me dead. Kindle for the win.
Ugly as it is, it's certainly not leaving my side for months to come.
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