Gadget Review: Amazon’s Kindle

13 July 2008 | Internet, Media | Comments

I’ve now read my fourth book on the Kindle and have enough of a take on it to write this post.

Big Takeaway #1: If you’re an inveterate reader like me, travel a lot for business like me, and have to read a lot of business books for your job like me, then, like me, you should get a Kindle.

Big Takeaway #2: Like digital camera technology (I’ve owned five digital cameras in the last seven years: four Canon Elphs and one big Canon EOS 20D SLR), I expect that the Kindle device will improve rapidly and that I’ll replace the one I have in a couple of years with something that has a better form factor, screen saturation, colorized “digital ink,” and more computer-like drag and drop functionality. However, like my first 2 megapixel digital camera, the Kindle has already changed my book-shopping, browsing, reading and buying behavior and I expect that it will continue to do so. A big win for Amazon.

The Details

Shopping experience: Whatever Jeff Bezos might say in his many Kindle-esque interviews, the Kindle is primarily a book purchasing and delivery device, and it does this well with its currently limited selection of 130,000 books. That might sound like a big number, but it’s really quite small — about what you’d see in your local Borders — and has a distinctly lesser feel to it than the general Amazon.com experience that exemplifies the long tail. My interests are pretty wide-ranging and so the Kindle selection feels quite constipated… but I know that this will change quickly over time.

I’m a big browser (in the bookstore sense, not the Firefox sense– hence my despair at the death of indepedent bookstores here in Los Angeles), and I enjoy the Kindle storefront that’s built into the device. The “Recommended for You” algorithm sucks and leans unduly on the things I’ve purchased for the Kindle, which is a small subsection of my interests (see above), but it’s entertaining and — hey! — now I can browse in the bathroom, a plus.

(Digression about algorithms: with my wife and kids out of town I flushed the children’s programming for TiVo and the poor TiVo threw up its digital hands at the prospect of all that spare capacity: desperate, it started recording everything, including old episodes of Seinfeld, city council meetings, the local KCAL news at 6pm and other things that nobody in my house would ever watch. This reminded me of Shelly Palmer’s story about the man whose TiVo thought he was gay because he liked cooking shows: the TiVo started suggesting all sorts of “Queer as Folk” like content, whereupon the guy started telling TiVo to record a lot of sports — which he didn’t like — just to convince TiVo that he was straight.)

Bandwidth blues: One of the weird things about the Kindle and Amazon’s business model behind it is that they are vague about the simple fact that it costs money to send things over their proprietary “Whisper Net” wireless service. That’s a problem because there is a universe of free electronic books and other content out there (e.g. Project Gutenberg) and the only way to view them on the Kindle is to do an elaborate work-around where you download the book to your desktop, convert to to a form the Kindle will recognize, and then email it to your Amazon/Kindle account. Then, you can either pay Amazon to send it wirelessly to your Kindle or you can connect your Kindle back to your computer to download it for free.

Which brings me to blogs: I’m simply too cheap to pay between 99 cents and $1.99 per month to have access to blog content that I can get on my computer for free– particularly when I have RSS subscriptions to over 100 blogs on my iGoogle page. That gets pricey fast. Near as I can tell, the only reason that Amazon charges for blog access is the bandwidth (thanks to Josh Messinger for pointing this out), so why doesn’t Amazon create a “free-blog-PC-sync” option whereby I won’t pay anything but I won’t get new blogs until I hook the Kindle up to my computer? I’m already syncing my Treo and my iPod at least once a day… it wouldn’t be much to add another device.

Furthermore, I have a wireless network in my home and I have a wireless network in my office: in an ideal world the Kindle (not to mention the iPod) should be able to connect to my wireless networks (which I’ve already paid for and which would cost Amazon nothing to use) when they are available, saving Amazon the bandwidth fees and increasing the footprint the Kindle has in my mindshare by orders of magnitude. Amazon should do the same with free eBooks– people who aren’t as cheap as me can pay to download them and Scrooges can either wait until their Kindle is in a free wifi zone or grab the cable.

Note: the new iPhone “Remote” application is a step in this direction for iTunes and AppleTV.

Reading experience/form factor: This is the biggie, of course, and I’d give the Kindle a solid B+ when it comes to reading experience. (Brian Seth Hurst warned me about this and he was right.) Whether I’m holding the Kindle in its leather carrier or just holding the device, it’s entirely too easy to press by accident both the “Next Page” button on the right or the “Prev Page” button on the left… leaving me adrift in the middle of the book with no idea where I was.

Without pages, there is no kinaesthetic “hmm, I was about HERE I think” ability to find my page, and the Kindle has abandoned pages for new-fangled “locations” anyway. The point being that if you have slippery fingers like mine then you’d best get in the habit of using the bookmark option to mark your place on a fairly regular basis or you’ll find yourself sending a lot of time clicking through to find your location. The Prev Page button makes a weirdly audible click while the Next Page button does not. This might have been an engineer’s bright idea about making it obvious when a user hits the wrong button, but it makes it difficult to curl up with the Kindle in bed because if I DO hit the wrong button then the subsequent hunt-CLICK, hunt-CLICK to find my place disturbs my wife, who is either reading her analog book or sleeping next to me.

Once I’m actually READING something in the Kindle, the experience is pleasant and it’s relatively easy to get lost in a book. I find it easier to read fiction than non-fiction in general, and that’s true on the Kindle platform as well. The black text on grey background is easy on the eyes, although if I had my druthers and could figure it out I’d probably make the grey whiter. I predict that as Amazon’s digital ink technology gets better the Kindle will have illustrations that make sense (there were a couple of illustrations in Gregg Hurwitz’s outstanding thriller “The Crime Writer” that were simply indecipherable on the Kindle) as well as color. The absence of backlighting saves on battery life, but also means that I can’t read in bed at night without a light on.

Similar to the difficulties in finding my place when I’ve lost it, the progress bar at the bottom of the Kindle can be misleading when it comes to how close to the end of the book I am. For example, I just finished the Elmore Leonard novel “Cat Chaser” on the Kindle this morning. The progress bar told me that I had about 1/4 of the book left to go when the story abruptly ended. Why did this happen, because the eBook version of the novel that I’d purchased had a bunch of extra materials at the end… an interview with Leonard, etc. The Kindle had an insufficient set of cues to let me know that I was getting near to the end, and I felt cheated.

Navigating within and around the Kindle is just plain old-fashioned. It reminds me of the Apple II I had back in the early 1980s when everything was menu driven and there was no geographic “drag and drop,” “put things inside of other things” metaphor like what happened a few years later with the first Macintosh and then Windows.

With the Kindle, I have to use an odd scroll wheel to navigate up and down the right side of the screen, pushing down on the scroll wheel (which tends to slip from the position that I want it to be in), and then going up and down hierarchical menus in a time-consuming way.

This is a big pain in the neck. I want the Kindle to be more like the iPhone. I want to see a book I want to read — a book that I’ve either had delivered from my PC to the Kindle or purchased right on the Kindle — and simply touch the screen with my finger to have the book open.

To infinity and beyond… While I suspect that the Kindle will have a series of new versions over the next few years, I don’t know how long the Kindle will be around as a device.

Take Amazon’s current online technology and the Kindle, add Google’s new Lively virtual world plugin for a geographically browsable bookstore, free WiFi access, color, an interactive touchscreen, better buttons and bookmarking technology, and you’ll see a fast-developing platform. However, will the Kindle spread the way that Apple computers and game consoles have spread where the hardware is a closed system or will it spread the way that the Windows OS has spread, where the hardward is almost immaterial? Are we looking at a series of devices, a software platform or both?

In my opinion, the best thing for Amazon and its customers would be for it to open its API and let other hardware manufacturers create Kindle-compliant eBook readers. Amazon’s strength is in getting people the things they want quickly and at a reasonable price. They should focus on that, not the device itself.

Two Followup Notes on the Kindle: It’s now a few hours later and I have two passing addenda. First, one thing the Kindle is very good at is enabling the user to eat and read at the same time. Unlike a conventional book (a.k.a. a “codex”), the Kindle stays open to the page you’re on even if you’re busy chewing a sandwich. Second, on the downside in the middle of my sandwich the Kindle’s battery went low and I had to abandon my reading of Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet” while it charged up again.

Tomayto, tomahto…