Second Thoughts on the Kindle

I gave my first impressions of the Kindle a while back. Now that I have been using the Kindle for a couple of months or so a few more observations come to mind.

First, there was a minor inconvenience in taking on my first airline flight. At one airport, it was in my carry-on case. After walking through the security check, the bag did not come through. Shortly one of the security folks asked who owned that bag. Something had set off a red flag. They had detected that an electronic device was inside my bag. So, the Kindle had to be resent through the X-ray machine alone just like a laptop. However, after getting on the plane, it was very convenient to read from it: no pages to turn, no book to keep open, no bookmark to reset.

I'm now on my second purchased book. I started with "Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell and am now reading a Winston Churchill biography. The Sowell book was formatted very well for the Kindle. Every paragraph or two was separated by a couple of lines of whitespace. This made it fit very well onto the relatively small Kindle screen. The Churchill biography has a more traditional formatting. Sometimes this leads to paragraphs extending over more than one screen full.

Now that the iPad will be out soon, I am wondering if that might be a better experience. For just reading books, the Kindle I have is adequate. I'd like a bigger screen. Color would be nice but is not necessarily a practical concern. 99.9% of all the books I have ever read are pretty much black and white and mostly text. Maybe color capabilities would offer more subtle contrast potential, making it even easier on the eyes.

Dave Winer, who was very enthusiastic about the Kindle when it was first released has some interesting current thoughts in the context of the iPad release.

First Take on the Kindle

I've had a Kindle for a couple of weeks now. So far I have read a couple of articles in PDF form, browsed the Kindle store, chosen some previews of a few best sellers from the store and purchased one book to read on the Kindle.

Learning to use it was a breeze. Scanning the Kindle User Guide, which is provided once the device is registered, was more than enough to understand how to use the basic functions. There was a little confusion when trying to re-size the text on PDFs but that was because you really can't do that.

The PDFs I tried to read displayed in very small typeface - too small to read. The re-size text feature is not provided for PDFs as it is for Kindle books. However, you can rotate the orientation to landscape, causing the PDF to re-size itself to fit the available area. This results in text large enough to read, but very small pages vertically. It was usable though.

Browsing the Kindle book store is easy. You can select books of interest and load a preview to your Kindle. The size of the preview is specific to the book, but the ones I loaded ranged from a very generous preface + two full chapters to as little as part of the first chapter for another.

While I am not a book purist, since I already read a lot of documents on my laptop, online, PDF or Word documents, I wondered what the reading experience on the Kindle might be like. So far, it's different but in a good way.

First, the amount of text displayed on the screen is less than a true book page (at least on the model I have). This is usually a paragraph or two. This can be changed if you go to a different text size, but so far I have stuck with the default as that seems to be fine.

This smaller amount of text seems to make me both read faster and also be happy with only reading short amounts of the book at a time. With a real book, I typically push through to complete at least a chapter at one sitting. With the Kindle, I feel much more satisfied to turn it on, read a few screens for 5-10 minutes or so, then put it away.

For non-fiction, this has the effect of snagging a few ideas in spare minutes rather than pushing for a bigger picture idea of the entire chapter. I am sure this has pluses and minuses, but so far does not seem to negatively affect my ability to discuss and describe what I've read with friends.

The compactness of the Kindle is also attractive, although I have not yet experienced being able to take scores of books on a trip or flight on a single slim, light piece of plastic.

Since it is not back-lit, but uses electronic paper technology, you will need a light to read in bed, which is different from a laptop. The advantage is that the digital ink technology does not use power to keep the screen refreshed, so, once painted, the power consumption is low.

I believe, but do not know yet, that e-book technology will encourage re-reading of at least parts of already consumed books or periodicals, since it is very quick and easy to locate a chapter and read a few ideas to refresh your memory on a particular topic.