So, I finally got a Kindle.
After two days of pretty intense use (I can’t resist the call of a shiny new gadget), here are some of my early thoughts on it:
Reading on the Kindle is a joy, but only barely. The E-Ink screen is very readable, regardless of lighting (the idea that you can read it anywhere you can read a book is basically true), the interface is usable, and the time it takes to turn pages doesn’t really disrupt the rhythm of reading. Wireless delivery and synchronization have worked, in my experience, flawlessly, and overall, the Kindle experience is to books what the iPod and iTunes are to music.
But, crucially, the Kindle is on the cusp of unusable. This isn’t because Amazon did something wrong, but rather because the line between a great eBook reader experience and a terrible one is so fine. I’ll elaborate:
A lot of the criticism of the nook, Barnes and Noble’s delayed but much hyped competitor to the Kindle, is that, like many Google Android devices, it’s slow. There’s an element of latency inherent to any e-Ink based device — the screens refresh much slower than the ones on a laptop, by writ of how they work — but on the nook, that latency is exacerbated by an operating system that can’t push pixels as fast as the screen can take them (and that isn’t particularly quickly to begin with).
I get the feeling that the Kindle, on the other hand, is held back exclusively by the speed of its display. Putting a faster processor in the Kindle wouldn’t improve the situation dramatically. The Kindle reading experience is smoother on my iPhone using the Kindle application, but that’s mostly because the refresh rate on my iPhone’s display is a good deal faster than the Kindle. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying: there’s nothing wrong with how quickly my Kindle turns pages, but if it were even half a second slower, I probably would be returning it. It’s that subtle a difference between success and failure with these things, probably because how we read is so deeply wired into our brains that any deviation from it is hugely disruptive.
There is, of course, the aesthetic question of the Kindle, which has nothing to do with the mechanics of reading. There are a lot of sensory elements of books — the smell of the paper, the sound of the rustling of pages, the feel of a paperback, the weight of the book in your hand — that the Kindle, by writ of being what it is, can’t duplicate. I’m as romantic about the notion of old books and the “feeling” of knowledge that comes with them — but at least for now, I don’t miss any of it. Setting my Kindle on top of a massive hardcover novel my father was reading this morning, I couldn’t help but think, This is the way of the future. I like the aesthetics of a book more than those of the Kindle (the wide plastic bezel around the display, for instance, is ugly, as is the cheap-looking keyboard), but they’re not enough to make me want to carry around a dozen paperbacks instead of one thin, light device that can contain all of them.
There’s room for improvement, though. The annotation features, while intuitive, are borderline unusable because of the refresh rate of the screen; typing with a half-second delay between key press and character display is disconcerting. The keyboard, in addition to being ugly, is nearly impossible to type on with anything resembling speed. There are occasional formatting issues that come up in books and magazines. But these are, in the big scheme of things, tiny complaints about a device that is, without a doubt, going to change the way I read. I can’t recommend it enough.