Kindling

Some quick impressions of the Kindle reading device after two days of use:

It’s smaller than I expected. The screen is larger than those on several PDAs I’ve used heavily to read on in the past, but not as large as even a small-format paperback. The small size is good and bad, of course. It’s incredibly thin, but it has a good heft to it, allowing you to feel comfortable handling it (i.e., not feel as if you’re going to break it). The keypad is correspondingly small, and at first I felt I was going to keep hitting two keys at once; but after getting used to it, and not being worried about pressing hard, I’ve managed to type decently well without typos (I’ve never had a phone/PDA with a keypad, so this thumb-typing is new to me).

The “electronic ink” performs as well as the hype: incredibly clear type and very nice grayscale images (when the device goes to sleep, the text is replaced by pictures of famous authors and old engravings). The type is scalable to six sizes, and I’m finding the second-smallest puts the most comfortably readable text on the screen. (One thing I didn’t like about reading on the PDAs was the scant amount of text per screen. I tend to circle back in my reading a lot, and it’s nice not to have to page back to get at the text.)

You really need adequate light to read on the Kindle. The surface is moderately nonreflective, so glare is pretty well under control. Coming from the PDA world, where I could read Great Expectations in low light (or no light), this will require a change in my lighting habits. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that the “paper” is an unexpectedly deep shade of gray, but it’s mainly due to the fact that the Kindle isn’t self-illuminated like a PDA or computer monitor.

Downloading new material from Amazon via the built-in wireless (“Whispernet”) is incredibly fast, as advertised. It’s almost too easy to buy new stuff—purchases go through Amazon’s One-Click checkout without the need to key in any personal information. The Manage Your Kindle page at Amazon is nicely designed, so it’s easy to keep track of your purchases and subscriptions.

Did I mention subscriptions? In addition to books, you can subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. I signed up for a trial subscription to the New Yorker, but I have no intention of subscribing to newspapers and blogs and I read online. I don’t need to carry those things around with me.

I’ve begun experimenting with converting non-Amazon content to the Kindle format. The main reason I have the Kindle is that I work for a place that publishes books. Should we start offering our titles to Kindle users? Two questions need to be answered:

1. Will our readers want to read our books on a Kindle? Tentative answer: hard to say. The Kindle is great for “page turners,” but it’s not clear how useful it would be for the more pedagogical material we publish.
2. Can we convert our content to Kindle easily? Tentative answer: no. Although there is free software for converting PDFs to Kindle format, and Amazon itself will do it for free, the results are less than satisfying.

Right now it looks like the best approach is to create a version of the book in Word or HTML with minimal formatting, then convert to the Kindle version. All the fancy design work in printed books, and the PDFs created from them, get in the way and sometimes even mess things up irretrievably. (Yet more incentive for us to convert to an XML-based production environment.)

Even if we find an optimal route to converting content, we may run into problems with getting extended characters to render on the Kindle (e.g., we use mathematical and scientific symbols a lot in our publications). Which leads me to an enhancement I expect Amazon to deliver at some point but haven’t seen discussed: support for other languages (e.g., Cyrillic).

How will the Kindle wear? One can’t help but wonder if the electronic ink will lose potency over time, or afterimages will start to get burned into the display. The engineers behind this technology may already have the answers, but consumers are left to wonder. How long will the buttons last? How sensitive is the Kindle to vibration? How scratch-resistant is the screen? How long will the integrated battery last? Only time will tell.

Finally, a word about the packaging: I was surprised at how small the shipping box was. It had a cute little ripcord that said “Once upon a time …” and once you get inside, you find another package with another ripcord lableled the same. The Kindle is nestled in a plastic cradle encased in some sort of recycled formed-fiber shell. There you find a power cord that doubles as a USB cord (the electrical plug detaches from the computer end of the cable) and a modest but handsomely made fan-fold brochure with quick-start instructions on six panels and legal stuff on five. No manual, no installation CD. When you start the Kindle for the first time, it opens the user’s manual stored on the device itself. It all adds up to a very ecological experience.

Bottom line: the Kindle won’t replace the printed book, just as television didn’t replace radio. But it is a clear advance in portable, nonpaper reading that will serve many people well in many circumstances. For now it is a luxury item, but if the price drops, it has the potential to be as common as a cell phone.

Addendum 2009.04.01: A commenter asked about the “universal AC plug,” wondering how big it is and whether it’s really universal. Here’s a photo—maybe you can just make out the writing that says “Input 100–240V”: