Review: Amazon's Kindle Book Reader

I've had my Kindle for about ten days now. I returned from a business trip and found it waiting for me in my office, and, at 10PM at night, I took it home, ripped open the packaging and started to play.

As most owner reviews have noted, the digital ink display is a wonder. Despite KNOWING that there are pixels displaying the letters on the screen, the "ink" is so dark and so well-formed, you quickly forget that this is some type of digital display. The flash between pages serves as a way to clear the screen I suppose, evoking memories of the Etch-A-Sketch being shaken upside down so that you could start a new picture.

The "cursor" is this indescribable mercury-like geometric device that lives on the right side of the Kindle display. After becoming completely comfortable with the Kindle's reading technology, I am still amazed at how this cursor technology works. It's difficult to describe without seeing it, but the mercury analogy still seems best to me.

I was a bit concerned about the WhisperNet coverage, in both my apartment and in my office. Both are large concrete block buildings. My Verizon Wireless and my Razr have more than a little trouble finding and keeping a signal, so I wondered if my Kindle might be an expensive white elephant without it's vaunted wireless connection. I was delighted to find nearly all bars in both locations, and I've yet to find a "dead" area in the relatively short time I've had my Kindle.

The user interface is both good and bad. The paradigm many of us are used to now comes from our use of GUI interfaces on personal computers. A cursor or mouse device selects objects on our PC screen and then we choose an action to perform (clicking, right-clicking, etc.). The Kindle's interface is similar, but different enough to call out as a slope to climb while becoming familiar with the device. The previously mentioned mercury-like cursor selects a LINE on the Kindle display. Depending upon context (the Home screen, inside a document, etc.), the Kindle then acts -- either going to a particular place in a document (if the line is a table of contents or a link), a document (if the line is a document title) or to a menu to choose various actions like looking up a word. This interface takes some getting used to, since thinking about the entire line as a unit of selection is different than most of our PC-based experiences. Once familiar with many of the circumstances around the interface, this is another aspect of the Kindle experience that tends to drift into the background.

The physical interface has been the most problematic for me. The Kindle has "flippers" on both edges -- devices that allow you to flip pages or navigate backwards (like the Back button on an Internet browser). These flippers are, understandably, rather sensitive, to make the page turning experience as seamless as possible. However that leaves little usable space around the Kindle to actually grab hold of it -- the top has a screen, and I've been programmed not to touch those types of displays, the sides are almost entirely the flippers and the bottom fourth of the device is a side-to-side spanning keyboard. There's about two inches of space between the screen and keyboard. So, if you're like me, and you hold your paperback on one side, your thumb will be in the precious unused space with a healthy space left by your enclosing fingers so as not to grab the flipper.

I can tell that I'll get used to this eventually, but everyone who picks up my Kindle for the first time is disconcerted by the flippers and the accidental page turns.

I have two other MAJOR complaints about the Kindle. The first is the lack of selection for my favorite genre, sci fi. It seems that every Star Trek and Star Wars book known to humankind has quickly been translated into the Kindle format. Likewise, the novel-length advertisements for Halo and other console games. I don't read any of these types of books, so it's been difficult finding authors and books I like. An author based search on the Amazon site reveals precious few books that I like available for the Kindle.

This brings me to the next little pet peeve: the vaunted Amazon search and recommendation capabilities seem pretty broken when it comes to the Kindle. For the regular Amazon site, we tolerate the silly habit that the recommendation engine has for recommending every edition of every book we already own (e.g., I own the hardback, so it recommends that paper back, or some other edition). However, for the Kindle, Amazon seems to have developed COMPLETE amnesia regarding my book collection. The Kindle site had four pages of recommendations, and all but one book were books that I already owned, had rated and have physical copies of. Only in Bezos' wildest dreams will I buy 1) the hardback version, 2) the paperback version and 3) the Kindle version. I can't imagine any circumstance that I'd want to DUPLICATE my book collection on my Kindle. Unlike the transition from LP's to CD's, the new Kindle reading technology offers convenience, not a better experience than their physical counterparts.

I don't have the huge problems with DRM that other folks (notably the "Kindle Swindle" spammers) have. I've been using iTunes for a long time, and have also purchased downloaded both Audiobooks and eBooks before. I think there are some compromise positions between offering an inconvenient ownership experience and screwing the authors and publishers out of their money. I have a number of eBooks in that Adobe DRM format. I would LOVE to be able to translate these into the Kindle format REPLACING my Adobe formatted versions. From a "rights" perspective, I think this is a fair proposition -- you can own the book in whatever format you choose, but not all of them at the same time (unless you see some utility in owning the LP, the cassette tape, the 8-Track and the CD of every album). Particularly for the e versions of a book, once the book has been digitized, the only incremental cost is delivery to the purchaser. If you own the eBook version, why not let me trade it for the Kindle version? I'll let Amazon work that one out...

Net net -- The Kindle keeps virtually all of its promises. If Amazon can retain it's brain regarding my book collection, to improve my Kindle recommendations, AND increase its offerings of Kindle books, this amazing device will be virtually perfect.