A New Leaf

Someone else's Kindle

One memory I have of freshman year in college is Jim’s first English assignment (everyone’s first assignments were momentous that year), for which the notoriously difficult-to-please professor asked everyone to write an essay on “What is Reading?”. No – I remember now – it was not his first assignment, but the paper he had to write in a single night in order to stay in the class he’d already registered for, due to an over-booked roster. I have no idea what he wrote, but it had something to do with interlocutors.

My Kindle arrived today (together with a handsome leather case, not shown), and I think it will change the answer to that question, but not very much.

First impressions: It’s an attractive device, and feels “solid” – the buttons aren’t flimsy, for example. It will disappoint you, however, if you expect it to behave like a computer – response times are long for things like scrolling through a menu of options. It seems clear that the designers were mostly concerned about two experiences: buying things to read, and reading those things. The rest of it (annotations, searching, etc.) takes a bit of patience.

Shopping on the Kindle is a snap – browse categories, type a search term, click buy, start reading. Quite impressive. Everything is delivered wirelessly over the Sprint cell network (which my Kindle says gets 5 bars here at my desk), without the need to sign up for or pay for any kind of wireless service. Entire books are downloaded very quickly (~20 seconds). You can delete the book from the device (not that you need to, seeing as it can store hundreds or thousands of volumes), and then re-download it later from your Kindle, computer, iPhone, or second Kindle.

Reading, the raison d’être of the Kindle, is equally smooth. Click the “Home” button, select a book, start reading. It appears that the Kindle book format allows for many different typefaces and typographical treatments. Re-size the text to suit your liking. At the most read-able text size, there is about a half-page of text on a screen, compared to an “actual” book. Turning pages takes about three-quarters of one second from button-press to new display. The table of contents is a button + click away. The screen itself is easy to read in both low-medium light and full-on sunlight, and does not induce eye-strain at all (there is no backlight). Integrated dictionary.

What is reading, indeed? Some things that reading on the Kindle is not: skimming, flipping through, jumping around, multi-chromatic. This is fine when you read a novel – a completely linear task. Start at page one, keep going until you finish. But with books like programming tutorials or references, I think the Kindle will not offer the best experience because using a book in a non-linear fashion is slow (page turn, page turn, page turn… or menu, scroll, scroll, click, scroll, scroll, click on “index”…).

But that’s okay! The Kindle doesn’t have to (and won’t) make books obsolete. The Gutenberg analogy only goes so far. In that case, illuminated manuscripts became relatively worthless – except for aesthetics, printed texts were superior in almost every setting and in almost every way. With e-books, though, only some settings and book types are improved. In my case, the Kindle will lighten my daily commuter bag about 2-3 pounds, and save me about $10 per book. But it won’t replace textbooks.

Those are my thoughts. So far very pleased.