A New Leaf

I posted a few months ago about my initial impressions of the Kindle 2. Since then, I’ve read the Wall Street Journal most weekdays on the train to work, a small part of a computer programming book, and 37% of a long novel (The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson).

e-Book readers don’t keep track of pages. The advantage of this is they can change the size of the text on the fly, re-paginating everything in the process. Note that this advantage is lost on PDFs, which have fixed page layouts. To increase the font size on a PDF, you have to zoom in then scroll around the page to see all the words. In other words, a bother. Since novels usually have very simple layout and typographical requirements (a single typeface, flush left/ragged right, the rare footnote), pagination can be arbitrary without sacrificing any readability. So I don’t see the Kindle’s lack of native PDF support as any big deal.

All this to say, I know that I am 37% of the way through my book because that’s how the Kindle shows progress. Instead of sitting down and thinking “I’ll read 20 or 30 pages before bed,” it becomes “I’ll read 1% before bed.” This is especially satisfying with respect to long books, where a single page feels like infinitesimal progress. I think this would also appeal to those of us for whom finishing many books is more interesting than finishing many pages. The best case, of course, is to finish many books each consisting of many pages. The percent-based progress bar helps here, as well, since it removes the intimidation factor of so many sheafs bound up together.

One (bad?) habit of mine that the Kindle suppresses entirely: looking ahead to see how many pages I have to read until I finish the current chapter.

I chose the Wall Street Journal as my Kindle newspaper because [a] I already read the New York Times online during my lunch hour and [b] the WSJ has a pay-wall online (except, oddly, when you link to a story from a Google search). The subscription costs $15 per month, conveniently and silently billed to the credit card tied to my Amazon account. It’s been nice to have – auto-wireless-delivery really must be the future of periodicals – but I think I won’t continue the subscription. I just don’t get enough out of it that I don’t get from reading the Times for free.

My brother bought the Sony Reader – similar to the Kindle. It has some nice features – small size, native PDF support, cool design. It could be the e-reader for you, especially if you live in a place without Sprint cellular network coverage (the Kindle’s connection to the outside world). If you live in the US, though, I think you’ll find that the Kindle’s wireless delivery (“WhisperNet”) is too good to pass up.