For people thinking of getting a Kindle, I can offer this advice after using version 1.0 for about a year. The more you do any of the following, the more you will like the device: read a lot, travel, skim classic reference works (e.g., Shakespeare, Democracy in America, the Origin of Species), surf the blogosphere at random moment; emphatically so if you spend time on the bus.
My pluses list goes like this:
* Public domain works are basically free. Shakespeare, Tocqueville, Machiavelli, the Federalist Papers and about ten more cost me about fourteen bucks total. Now I have them anyywhere I go.
* Unless you play music on it (for battery reasons, don’t) or you are a speed-reading champ, the memory holds as many books as you can ever want or afford.
* The rudimentary internet handles email badly, but otherwise it is great for surfing blogs and making quick purchases from Amazon. The cell-based connection does not drop as long as you stay within Sprint coverage. And it’s free.
* The legibility of the screen is great, much better than the displays on digital devices that do not use e-paper.
* The Kindle discount
The minuses:
* Although you can import PDF’s almost for free, the software chokes on unusual formatting such as figures in a scientific paper. As a professional scientist this is my single biggest beef with the device, so much so that it would be a deal killer if I had not received the Kindle as a gift. Competitive devices like the i-Rex do native PDF support but they don’t have Amazon’s generally excellent Kindle store or a free cellular internet link.
* No hard copies of your books. If Amazon or your account goes belly-up so does your library.
* Some of my favorite authors still have no Kindle edition. If anyone knows David James Duncan, Wally Broecker or (the estate of) Patrick O’Brien, let them know that they will make at least one sale.
* The page advance buttons are annoyingly easy to push no matter how you hold the device.
The version 2.0 Kindle only really addresses the last and least important of my gripes while not improving on much else as far as my needs go.
Today, however, Amazon announced an updated Kindle with a much larger screen (9.7″ rather than 6) that supports native PDF formatting. This is a huge deal that will make the Kindle vastly more useful for working scientists and anyone else who works with PDF files. If not for the steepish list price (eleven shy of $500) my v1.0 kindle would start getting nervous about unfortunate accidents.
Michael D.
I love my Kindle 2. I’ve downloaded so many public domain books, it’s scary. I’ll never get through them. I have a subscription to WaPo (that I will probably cancel because there is nothing on it I can’t get online for free.)
I think I have about 200 books on it so far. The only ones I’ve paid for a The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency and another. About $15 in total.
Plus, I read all my favorite blogs on it, including this one, all for free.
Since I’m someone who doesn’t get all hot and bothered over DRM, I don’t see any real downside.
wonkie
Is the text big enough to read comfortably?
I will never get into textmessaging or using a blackberry because I can barely see the devices, let alone the buttons and text on them.
Xecky Gilchrist
If Amazon or your account goes belly-up so does your library.
This right here is my biggest problem with devices like this. Permanent deal-breaker.
Michael D.
The text is as large as you will find in a book. You can increase the size easily.
leo
Soon the Kindle will have so many features, we’ll finally be able to call it a ‘netbook’.
wonkie
Being able to increase text size is critical. I’m at the point now where I need binoculars to read the phone book.
Otherwise it looks very cool. Great gizmo to take on camping trips.
zzyzx
The best thing about the Kindle is that I can read the books on my iPhone and not have to have a Kindle.
WereBear
I have the Kindle app on my iPod touch. Already seeing the addictive potential. While probably not as snazzy as the native machine, it is a two-fee, since I also have an iPod touch.
Speaking as a longtime tech geek, I have never fallen in love with a gadget so quickly and completely.
I love books and haunt used book stores so I wondered how I would adjust to the radically different experience. No problem, it turns out. In fact, reading a monster tome is easy as can be, which is a great advantage. I once dropped The Master Of the Senate on my cat Mr Bond, and I still feel guilty about it.
blahblahblah
I have an iRex iLiad that handles PDFs natively. But the Kindle DX is definitely the better of the two devices – bigger screen and cheaper to boot. However, the DX does not take pen input for annotations. One can only annotate text with the keyboard. If you need to annotate math or non-alphanumeric characters, the Kindle DX is not for you.
Scientists may wish for a competitor’s product that takes pen input. The DR-1000S does that with a 10″ screen, but its known to be buggy. I’d wait for a version from Sony or Apple.
djork
I have a Kindle 1. Well, had one. More on that in a second. My only gripe with it is the battery life, especially if reading blogs on the bus or what have you. (This has been addressed in Kindle 2, I am told.) Otherwise, I’m am/ was hooked on the thing. I especially like it for purchasing new books as the price is so much cheaper than buying the hardcover. However, there are still books that I want to own hard copies of, so I won’t be buying strictly on the Kindle from now on.
Last week, I put the Kindle in my backpack. When I got home and took it out, the screen had broken somehow. Now I get to figure out how to get the thing repaired, provided what I did to it is covered under the warrenty.
ArtV
The article I read also stated that the WaPo and NYT will be offering discounted DX’s along with subs to their papers. I’ll be surprised if it’s a significant discount, but it will be if they’re smart.
I might actually read a paper in that format if it was pushed to my Kindle every morning.
Cris
You really need to see the Kindle screen in person. It’s not equivalent to paper, but it’s far easier on the eyes than any LCD screen.
Dennis-SGMM
The number of books I could buy for $500 pretty much precludes my buying a Kindle. The fact that Amazon controls your Kindle’s access to content is also a bit off-putting. Though may be the nicest folks in the world at the moment Amazon is a publicly held company so there’s no guarantee that the deals of content or access will remain as sweet.
dmsilev
If you have an iTouch or iPhone and need to carry a library of PDFs around with you, I highly recommend the Papers app. Think of it like iTunes for your PDFs, complete with “playlists”, etc.
It works pretty well as a standalone app, but really shines when used as an adjunct to the program of the same name for the Mac, with automatic synching of libraries and so forth.
-dms
JayDenver
Okay, why doesn’t Amazon just give pre-loaded Kindles to some elementary school children as a kind of test bed project? Each year the device could be reloaded with the current grade level reading list. And there could be a library of reference titles and supplementary readings as well. That’s the direction they’re headed, I think.
CJ
It is amazing than any publisher would NOT have a Kindle format these days. One gripe I do have is why did Amazon put out the Kindle II when there was yet another one coming out so soon?
In any case, if the copyright mess surrounding Google’s library project ever gets straightened out, the Kindle will become incredibly more valuable than it already is.
CJ
Ned R.
I’ve started to see Kindles being used more often and while they lack Apple’s sense of design (it does matter — at least to me!) I can see the appeal. But I’m kinda holding off for the same reason I held off getting laptops all these years and still do — I really don’t want to carry around *anything* that big on a regular basis. (Which is why I like my iPhone so much.) Still I have a feeling some kind of eventual happy medium will result.
Michael D.
@JayDenver: Not sure I would want to give $350 pieces of equipment to a bunch of elementary school kids.
terry chay
Public domain books are not basically free, but actually free. Beyond the thousands of offerings from Amazon itself, search the web for “free kindle books” but basically anything in unprotected mobipocket (which is the same as Amazon’s format because they own the company) can be downloaded and transferred via USB to your Kindle for free.
While you are at it, download and install the free “calibre” which will make managing it much easier. It can also schedule, format, and install web sites so you can view web content offline on your Kindle for free.
As for giving them for free to schools, I think the plan is to do that on the higher education level and work their way down. It’s an amazing idea. I remember when iBooks for middle schoolchildren were considered the height of luxury.
BTW, Amazon does not “control your access to content” because of two things. 1) You can download and install free content via USB and 2) you can download and install protected content if you know how to get your Kindle to “look” like a generic mobipocket device (it’s a python script). I don’t bother with the latter, but whatever floats your boat.
Michael D.
@CJ:
The Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX are for different audiences. I have a Kindle 2, but wouldn’t want the DX because of the size. I imagine there is some overlap in audience, but I wouldn’t expect much.
Brachiator
@wonkie:
The text is easy to read and Kindle 2.0 has a keyboard option that lets you quickly and easily adjust text size.
Having treated myself to a Kindle 2.0 as a ridiculously self-indulgent reward, I can echo Tim’s listing of the devices virtues. I never had a chance to work with Version 1, but Version 2.0 is thinner, the keyboard is laid out better, and it is comfortable to handle and, most important, you can very comfortably read the text.
In addition to contemporary novels and inexpensive classic texts, one thing I enjoy big time is being able to purchase Sunday newspapers and read them in bed (my favorites are the New York Times, the Times of London and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the average non-subscription price is around .75 per copy). Yes, you could view them online for free, but I like being able to read them on a light-weight compact device I can take anywhere, and also being able to keep the copy of the online paper archived in the Kindle to refer to later (you can also delete it when you’re done).
The downside to newspapers and magazines is that tables and graphics are stripped out, and everything is black and white.
I also understand that there is a Kindle app for the iPhone.
From reading various blogs and other sites about it, I can see that it has found a niche success big time with two groups: some people with varying types of disabilities, who find page navigation simpler and less problematic.
The other group having fun are readers who love genre fiction, from science fiction to romance, who like to download an author’s complete series of novels.
I don’t know if the Kindle is going to “save” the newspaper business or if it is the ultimate e-book answer, but it is a fun and useful step in the right direction.
Also, for what it’s worth, I think I’ve gone as long as a week before I had to recharge the device.
Incertus
I’m sure I’ll get one eventually, once the anthologies I tend to teach from are available for download. I already have students who download copies of the poems on my syllabus instead of buying the anthology, so it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.
L. Ron Obama
OK, maybe so. But the first book I looked up, The Algorithm Design Manual, is $63.96 in hardcover and $57.56 in Kindle form. I assume that it is a fixed discount? (That particular hardcover is delivered with a digital PDF copy anyway.)
JayDenver
@Michael D.: Why not? They seem to be able handle bicycles, Nintendos, pc’s, and other kinds of pricey equipment well enough. Or are you worried about theft?
Will
You don’t need Amazon for the device to work. Check the Kindle’s Wikipedia entry for a bunch of links to free books. Pretty much anything from early in the century on back is free and available to download in a Kindle-readable format. A lot of publishers are also offering free, newer books for the device. A lot of mystery and sci-fi/fantasy series have the first book free from Amazon or the publisher.
And you aren’t tied to a a single company or account. Just back up your files on your computer as you would your MP3 player and if Amazon goes belly-up, you’ve still got your library. I’ve only downloaded a couple books from Amazon and leave the wireless off – it saves power – and yet have a full library on the device.
I love mine. I keep it by my bedside and the ability to read exactly what I am in the mood means that my book reading has shot up. The killer ap for me, though, is the ability to up the size of the font for any book. I am able to read at exactly the size I am comfortable.
Jon H
I just got a Kindle 2 a couple of months ago. Love it. I haven’t been shy about buying full-price books on it, either.
I’ve probably spent more on books for it than I spent on the device. It still saves some money. Borders lists Stigum’s “The Money Market” for $125, but the Kindle version was $75, and it’s a very thick book so the kindle version is far more useful.
I’m tempted to get the DX and sell my present kindle. Programming code doesn’t seem well-suited to the small screen of the Kindle 2. On the other hand, the big DX might be more unwieldy on a crowded bus, and less compatible with reading while walking down the street.
gmcnorelation
I have had my K1 for almost a year now. My wife got one some months ago. (Hers is also on my account, so we can both access the same books even simultaneously; blogs or magazines are only available on one or the other, though.) She was bothered by the buttons, too, but is a huge fan of the ability to enlarge the text; I prefer smaller text so I can focus more on full phrases (sounds like we need baby bear text…) Primarily we got tired of the library clutter. I still love books, but I don’t need every paperback scifi or mystery.
I am not very worried about losing my books if Amazon goes bad, but I have backed them all up on my hard drive as an easy safeguard. If someday Amazon is gone and both Kindles go bad, my books in proprietary format (Cory Doctorow has some choice words for them about that) may be a problem, but I’ll trust somebody has a hack available by then – if they don’t already. In any case, all the other e-books will be fine.
Rosali
Anyone interested in buying a Kindle should use the handy dandy Amazon link to the left.
gmcnorelation
Check manybooks, feedbooks and mobipocket for lots of free public domain books and stories in Kindle-friendly and other formats. Baen and Tor are two scifi publishers with many freebies in multiple formats — sometimes quite recent books show up. Open Source at archive.org also has lots of creative commons licensed books, stories and free audio versions.
Also, when an author has something new coming out soon, publishers sometimes release a free copy of one of his or her past works to hook new readers. This seems to be happening with increasing frequency, and Amazon sometimes makes these available for free download on its Kindle site.
edmund dantes
Yeah, but they can brick your kindle for stuff unrelated to your actual kindle account.
Kind of sucks that they can basically make your 350 dollar purchase almost completely useless at their whim.
Jon H
@edmund dantes: “Kind of sucks that they can basically make your 350 dollar purchase almost completely useless at their whim.”
You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. The guy can always sell his Kindle, after all.
djork
I’ve noticed that technical books are significantly more expensive, but who would want to use the Kindle for reference works anyway? In my opinion, it’s not the best format for a book that you’ll be using often or for that has any amount of depth. I think the Kindle is better suited for novels, periodicals, and light non-fiction.
I have serious retention issues with the Kindle format. I bought “Team of Rivals” for the Kindle and made it maybe 30 pages in before I realized I was having trouble following the book. On the other hand, lighter non-fiction books, such as “What’s the Matter with Kansas” are perfect for the format. Books of this sort are usually in the $10.00 range, compared to 14 and up for the trade paperback edition and 20 and up for the hardcover.
Others may not experience this problem, but that’s been my experience.
Gus
Until they can get the pages to yellow and get that old book musty smell that I love so much, I doubt I’ll get one. I like to write in the margins and underline stuff. Can you do that with a kindle?
The Other Steve
Call me a luddite, but I just really have no interest in Kindle, even though I invented the concept back in 1986. :-)
Here’s my basic problem. I like books. I love books. I worked in a library in college, and nearly went on to study to be a librarian.
If I want to read a classic novel, Dickens, Dostoyevsky or whatever, I also want a hardcover copy of it on acid-free paper to keep on my shelf.
The books which I find are disposable are tech-books. I’ll buy some book on data access technologies or something knowing full well that in three years I’ll probably be tossing it. However from everything I’ve heard the Kindle is worthless for tech books because it doesn’t support the complex typography and drawings, and most tech books I don’t read them. I browse… rapidly. I’ll flip through a chapter just to refresh my memory on something.
That, and I don’t ride a bus or take a train or even fly much so I don’t see when I’d use it ever. Maybe in the bathroom. Hard to justify that.
Michael D.
@edmund dantes:
I heard this awhile ago. This is the ONLY report I’ve heard about something like this happening. I’ll give Amazon the benefit of the doubt that it was something more serious. If I start hearing about more issues like this, then I will be concerned.
I suspect we’re only getting one side here and there is more to this.
Michael D.
@Gus:
Yes!
The Other Steve
It’s fascinating to me how much opposition there was to DivX back in 1998… and yet now geeks just joyously jump up and down for iphones and itunes and kindles and such. Same basic concept…
I agree though, I don’t like digital purchases.
Tim F.
Have it and love it. When I describe it to other scientists I use almost exactly the same words.
Rosali wins the thread.
Jon H
@The Other Steve:
I think books are going to become (at least for me) like digital images. I’ll pay for nicely-printed, bound or framed hardcopies for my favorites. The others I’ll keep on my kindle or use as desktop images on my computer.
The Kindle does support drawings. I imagine the big-screen DX will work even better with them. And it’ll handle PDF internally, so typography may not be a problem.
As for browsing, the kindle’s ability to search through all your books, or just the currently open book, is very useful, and something not easily duplicated with a physical library. (Unless Amazon or Google starts to let you provide a list of books for limiting searches to just those books’ contents. That’d be handy.)
Jon H
@Gus: ” I like to write in the margins and underline stuff. Can you do that with a kindle?”
Yes, and the notes and marked passages are stored in a plain text file that you can access when you plug the kindle into your computer. So if you do a bunch of marking and noting on the train, they aren’t locked in there or in a proprietary format. You can suck them out of your kindle and into your word processor very easily.
Mike
I’ve had Kindle 2.0 for three months now. I have mixed feelings about it.
The bad:
1. The $9.99 price point has been abandoned by some publishers and a growing # of kindle books are priced near that of their hardback versions.
2. Navigating the Kindle versions of newspapers is cumbersome – it’s a lot more pleasant (and free) online.
3. With your free Internet access you can read blogs and do other things, but it’s not a great user experience. Then again, I have an IPhone, so I’m spoiled.
4. Your reliance on Amazon.
The good:
1. Fun. Easy. My book reading has really declined with the rise of the Internet and blogs, and now I’m back to 1.5 books/wk.
2. Changing text size.
3. Don’t have to worry about page turning when using clip-on light.
4. Instant downloading of free book samples.
5. Device can sync w/ IPhone Kindle app. So if I’m reading a book on the Kindle at night and suddenly find myself in a long line, I can open the IPhone app, and it’ll know exactly where I left off. Then the Kindle will know how far I advanced when I pick it up at night.
Verdict:
The Kindle now is only for those who really, really love devices or those who actually will take advantage of the free book offerings.
NonyNony
@The Other Steve:
DivX also had the annoying property of being an environmental nightmare, what with all those plastic/metal coasters that were going to be cranked out on a daily basis. So you actually had multiple groups of people with overlapping interests pretty upset about the concept. People are also more complacent with digital purchases because they’re not buying a physical object, they’re buying a data file.
And the prospect of a company being able to do that to me is why I’m still pretty luddite in my purchases. I don’t spend much more than $5 on a digital download, and it better not have any kind of copy protection scheme more complex than a watermark embedded in the file or else I’m out. That’s part of why I haven’t been all that anxious to invest money in a Kindle – what I really want is a PDF reader that is about the size of the new Kindle DX that I can completely control – no uploading things to Amazon to download to the Kindle, no special store to visit, none of it. Just a simple transfer of PDF to the device, much like I can currently transfer text files to my old Palm pilot for reading. Any opportunity for a company going out of business or abandoning the product line to mess with my use of the product is enough to keep me scared off away from said product.
Jon H
@NonyNony: “o uploading things to Amazon to download to the Kindle, no special store to visit, none of it. Just a simple transfer of PDF to the device, much like I can currently transfer text files to my old Palm pilot for reading.”
You can transfer text files (and a few other formats) to the kindle without going through Amazon. The DX, since it can handle pdf, probably also allows directly copying pdfs to it via USB, without going through the conversion process.
Martin
I’m almost certain Apple will have a similar device out by years-end based on the iPhone OS but with a color screen. Probably a shorter battery life, but it’d pull from the full universe of iPhone apps and you’d have a full-blown web browser not to mention I could see it tapping into your home media stuff, so it could stream music, video, etc.
Apple’s DRM Fairplay can wrap any kind of file, so if they could work out a deal with publishers, they could easily just extend the media store to handle PDF or whatever file format the publishers wanted.
Technologically, Apple has everything already deployed except for the screen (which is no small thing) and the cheap data service (which shouldn’t be too hard). iPhone OS 3 already does dynamic scaling of controls to handle large screens, so I think it’s imminent.
The Other Steve
Agreed. I guess it’s not fresh in people’s memory what can happen when things break or a company goes out of business and why us old folks tend to avoid certain contraptions as a result.
I still remember my brother having a integrated word processor back in the 1980s. It was a little typewriter with a display and you could save files to disk. Cost about $450. The display died, it was going to cost $600 to replace and since it wasn’t made any more you couldn’t buy a new one either.
He lost everything he had written… the disks couldn’t be read on any other computer, and without the display you couldn’t navigate through to print them off.
HumboldtBlue
Killick! Killick there! If that coffee isn’t on the table in 30 seconds your name won’t be Preserved Killick for long!
I’m guessing you have the cookbook, the music cds and the companion books as well.
HyperIon
Help me out here, kindle experts.
My 83 year old mom is a big reader and would benefit from the variable sized text. But she is not computer literate.
So I’m trying to imagine how she would get the public domain stuff. I take it that there is a USB port on the Kindle. So what kind of software is needed for downloading? Anybody know if public libraries are offering this service? I’m wondering how she could use a public computer (like at the library) to load up the device.
Brachiator
@The Other Steve:
I love reactions like this, because the love of books expressed is admirable but kinda historically wrongheaded.
I love Dickens and Conan Doyle. Love them madly. But these works were not originally released as “books,” but were serialized in magazines. And stuff like The Published Works of Shakespeare were after-the-fact compilations in obsolete formats (the folio and quarto). The same is true of works like The Three Musketeers, which was first published in serial form in the magazine Le Siècle between March and July 1844.
To declare that everything must be in the form of a book is no more necessary than to suggest that scrolls are more “authentic” than books.
I love literature, and it is an absolute gas to have the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo and several Dickens favorites all on a single device, a portable library.
Or, I should say, I love reading. I will embrace whatever format lets me do that.
By the way, I should also mention that the Kindle has a serviceable text-to-speech feature that can be used to listen to stuff, if that is your pleasure.
Roger Moore
@HyperIon:
It depends on how much money she wants to save. Many public domain books are available from the Kindle store at very reasonable prices. Yes, it’s not 100% free, but it’s more convenient than doing it the other way, and in many cases it includes nicer formatting than you’re likely to get from the public domain version. As an example, I got Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, complete with the original illustrations, for $1.19, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for $0.99, and Dracula for $0.60. The Complete Shakespeare was a bit more ($4.79), but it still seems reasonable to me.
Cat G
The easiest way to acquire public domain books is to buy them from Amazon. Many are free, or 99 cents, with collections up to $5.00. For example, a collection of 16 Dickens novels are $.99. She can browse Amazon using her Kindle. I browse online with my PC, send myself free samples of authors I’m interested in. I then read the samples on my Kindle and if I like them, then I purchase and download them using my Kindle which is very easy and very fast. At any time while reading the sample, you can turn on the wireless, choose an option that says “do you want to buy this book?” say yes, and wait about a minute.
Another way to acquire public domain for free is to go to feedbooks.com, browse for the books that you want, choose the Kindle format and download to your PC. Use the USB cable to transfer them to your Kindle. It’s very easy if you’re computer literate, but if you’re not, I would recommend just getting them from Amazon.
My sister and I both have Kindles on a single account so that we can read each other’s books.
The ability to change fonts is terrific. And holding and reading a Kindle is much easier than reading a traditional book, as it is light and you can read one handed.
Jon H
@HyperIon: “So I’m trying to imagine how she would get the public domain stuff”
Email it to her. She’d have an email address, like ‘[email protected]’. Anything sent to that address gets converted (if necessary) and automatically downloaded to her device the next time the cellular functionality is turned on.
It costs a little money, to cover the cellular connection, but only about $.15 a megabyte, so less than a stamp for a typical ebook, and much easier than asking her to deal with USB.
You’d need to add your email address to her whitelist on the page for her kindle account at Amazon. Only addresses in the whitelist, or the customer account’s main email address, can send files to a person’s kindle.
DaddyJ
@HumboldtBlue: Yeah, Patrick O’Brian kicks ass. Or should that be “arse?” A cookbook, eh? No spotted dick for me, if you please, but the wine stands by you.
I tried out Kindle on my iPhone with Charlie Stross’ Atrocity Archives (an appropriate author for such an experiment, I thought) and it took me a while to adjust to the readability issues. What was interesting to me is how it seemed to make a fairly short novel longer, simply because of the smaller word count per “page.”
It also introduced a feeling of tunnel-vision. I think you pick up peripheral information about a text beyond the line that you are scanning. Plus it makes paging backwards to check on something just a little bit harder, or at least disorienting.
Is the page layout in a Kindle more analogous to the same book in meat-space? Does that reduce most of the effects I encountered on an iPhone?
WereBear
As mentioned previously, some of Kindle’s biggest fans are people who have trouble juggling a traditional book setup, I read one such review from a man who is a quadriplegic, and it has made his life much easier.
And making the text size bigger is enough for some people.
(BTW, my cat wasn’t hurt when I dropped the book on him.)
Erik
Um, this is incorrect. Your library is tied to your Amazon account, which except for the case mentioned above is fairly permanent (and I suspect they worked something out for the guy above). So if your Kindle dies / is stolen / whatever, you can get a new Kindle and all you have to do is re-sync and download your books.
My wife did just this – she was playing with a friend’s Kindle I on a recent trip, bought a bunch of books, gave her Kindle back, and when her Kindle II arrived, just re-downloaded everything.
Totally awesome!
Jon H
Well, I just ordered a DX.
Cat G
re:@Jon H: “email it to her.” Well, duh.. it hadn’t occurred to me to do that. I just tested that with a book I’d downloaded from feedbooks.com….and it took less than a minute. Thanks…
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
I’ve looked at the Kindle and I’m not sure I can see the use. Why? It’s not because I’m a luddite. Far from it, I just prefer having all my needs into one nice super converged little package. In other words, I want this on my cellphone. With a fairly large screen on a cellphone (>3″), surfing the web and reading PDFs/e-books are pretty darn easy for me. So getting a Kindle seems like a redundant purchase. No?
Brachiator
@HyperIon:
There are a number of free or very cheap ( .80 or .99) offerings available on the Kindle site itself. So in many cases, a person can just use the built-in wireless technology of the Kindle itself. This is a tremendous advantage since you don’t have to use another computer or access the amazon site to get books, but can just do it through the Kindle. So even if your 83 year old mom is spry and active, she won’t necessarily have to go to the library or anywhere else to get stuff.
There might be a way to use an amazon account that you have to buy books for her. Here she would just have to have the wireless-function turned on to get the books automatically downloaded into the Kindle.
And yeah, there are other ways to download texts to the device.
Fortunately, even if you don’t have an amazon account, you can go to the Kindle area of the site and read or download an FAQ, a quick-start guide (pdf format) and other user information to help determine if the device might suit your mother’s purposes.
The Pale Scot
until the estate goes digital;
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3298444/O_Brian_Patrick_-_Aubrey_Maturin_series__ENG___LIT_
but I always found the Richard Bolitho series far more interesting.
Bolitho’s ship handling and leadership skills would have blown anything Captain Jack Aubrey could have mustered out of the water.
http://www.sea-room.com/series/kent-series.html
Sloop of war is a good place to start.
Dan Parkinson is another writer of salty books
http://www.amazon.com/Fox-Faith-Dan-Parkinson/dp/0786005556
And have you ever read the Richard Sharpe series?
http://www.amazon.com/Sharpes-Eagle-Richard-Adventure/dp/0451212576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241638346&sr=1-1
HumboldtBlue
@DaddyJ: Faster Doudle has my cello.
As for Kindle, I’m not sold on yet another piece of gadgetry.
The Pale Scot
If the pirate link is a NoNo.
sorry wasn’t thinking
I always found the Richard Bolitho series far more interesting.
Bolitho’s ship handling and leadership skills would have blown anything Captain Jack Aubrey could have mustered out of the water.
http://www.sea-room.com/series/kent-series.html
Sloop of war is a good place to start.
Dan Parkinson is another writer of salty books
http://www.amazon.com/Fox-Faith-Dan-Parkinson/dp/0786005556
And have you ever read the Richard Sharpe series?
http://www.amazon.com/Sharpes-Eagle-Richard-Adventure/dp/0451212576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241638346&sr=1-1
Persia
@Brachiator: To declare that everything must be in the form of a book is no more necessary than to suggest that scrolls are more “authentic” than books.
True, but books are a more portable and useful way of carrying text than scrolls. It remains to be seen if the Kindle is– see the list of drawbacks and pluses above and add ‘no used market’ and ‘can’t read in the tub.’
L. Ron Obama
@djork:
I can easily jam a novel or periodical in my backpack for the train. Paperbacks and magazines are light and I rarely need access to more than one at a time; certainly not a thousand! But I read a lot of technical papers in PDF form on the computer, which can be visually annoying, and reference books are heavy.
$490 is far too expensive, but the native PDF reading is a great addition. If I had money to burn…
L. Ron Obama
@Persia:
I try to buy as many books used as I can, so I’ll grant you that. But I’ve tried reading in the tub and it always winds up a disaster.
Rosali
Another plus: You can read a book while working out on cardio machines. The treadmills and elliptical machines at my gym have a little ledge on the control panel which holds the Kindle and I can easily flip through the pages. It makes the workout time go by faster.
Jon H
@Persia: “‘can’t read in the tub.’”
Just put it in a ziploc bag or two, and maybe a layer of clear plastic wrap just to be super-safe. And a folded-up paper towel in the baggie, behind the kindle, to soak up any water that gets through.
Jon H
@Rosali: ” I can easily flip through the pages”
The Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature also turns the pages automatically, so you wouldn’t even need to press the buttons.
JosieJ
I love my Kindle 2! I don’t know if I’d recommend them for everyone, but if you’re like me, it’s perfect.
I’m a serial re-reader. If I like a book, I’ll read it over and over again, and usually pick up things I missed the first time around.
I’m usually reading several different things at once, and usually skip around based on my mood. The Kindle allows me to carry everything with me and skip around at will.
I read very fast. The Kindle allows me to either start something else that I already have on the device, or purchase something else to read and have it delivered wirelessly to my device within a minute or so.
I read during my morning and evening commutes–it turns a boring train ride into a chance to escape into another world! I also appreciate the ability to increase or decrease the print size at will–in the morning when my eyes are fresh, I can use a smaller text, but in the afternoon, with my eyes strained from staring at a computer screen all day, I can easily increase the text size for more comfortable reading.
I’m not about to give up reading or purchasing print books, or browsing around in bookstores, but for the way I use it, the Kindle is a great convenience for me.
Jon H
One feature that would be nice: a GPS so that you could have the Kindle warn you when your stop is coming up. That’d let you focus on the text instead of trying to stay aware of your location so you don’t miss your stop.
Also, it’d be nice if there was a wireless remote control for turning pages.
grendelkhan
Yes; this is a natural consequence of DRM. If you’re willing to violate the DMCA, it’s reportedly possible to decrypt the books into standard MobiPocket documents, which are about as standardized and portable as ebooks are ever going to be–that is, you can read them on an iPhone, most other ebook readers, a copy of FBReader on your laptop, or whatever.
I don’t have a Kindle, so I don’t know if those instructions work. But I do know that if you want to have your books for the long term, you’ll have to break the DRM at some point.
Even though you’re permitted to back up your own data for exactly the purpose you outline, it’s still apparently illegal to bypass a copyright protection mechanism in order to do so. (I should point out that I’m not a lawyer here, I suppose–this is just my no-doubt-flawed understanding of the issues.)
I also want to make it very clear that I’m not encouraging anybody to go out and pirate books. There are already places to do that, and you don’t need a Kindle to do so in any case. This is how to pretend that Amazon is selling long-term, DRM-free formats. There are also retailers that sell ebooks in Kindle-compatible formats without DRM attached, like FictionWise, but their selection isn’t quite as huge.
mcsey
Nice post grendelkhan and an excellent example of why the DMCA is bad law.
Brachiator
@Persia:
But then, hundreds of books in a single portable device beats a stack of books any day.
And I read one Kindle review (journalist James Fallows perhaps) who noted another joy of Kindle, namely to stock up on travel or vacation reading. Far easier (and lighter) to download a few bestsellers than to have to pack a number of take-along books.
I’ve never cared about the used market, at least not as a seller, and never wanted to work through the gyrations necessary to keep a book from getting wet while trying to read it in the tub.
The Kindle (or something like it or superior) is inevitable, and not necessarily as a replacement of books, but as a very useful alternative.
Ditto. And didn’t Apple finally get away from DRM for iTunes?
grendelkhan
More to the point, Amazon sells DRM-free MP3s. There’s a complex interaction between the copyright owners (RIAA members, publishers) and retailers (Apple, Amazon) which would explain why Amazon sells DRM-free music but not DRM-free books.
(I would be curious to know if the linked instructions still work. Any Kindle owners want to give it a shot and let me know?)
Martin
Yeah, Apple always wanted to sell DRM free, but the labels wouldn’t go for it. They’ve moved the music folks along, but not the video guys. I imagine book publishers will be very hard to move because their files are so small and this is such a major shift for them.
Hedley Lamarr
“If Amazon or your account goes belly-up so does your library.”
Why is that? I thought you downloaded them to your device. Would Amazon somehow reach down and wipe out your memory as they fold?
Actually, if Amazon goes belly-up we rural folk are all lost.
Jon H
@Martin: “I imagine book publishers will be very hard to move because their files are so small and this is such a major shift for them.”
And the vast majority of books don’t offer much merchandising potential or other ancillary income-producing venues that could, potentially, be milked for income to make up for any losses.
passerby
Loving my kindle2. Here’s hoping Amazon is “too big to fail”.
The whispernet allows me to browse blogs [no BJ yet : ( ] and major newspapers while sitting at the bedside of my hospitalized mom (no laptop so this will have to provide my fix).
I got a vinyl skin from i-styles. Spiffy.
Tim F.
I browse BJ all the time on my Kindle. Just enter it in the URL bar and the site will load fine. Certain sites with blogrolls on the left will be more of a problem. Atrios is bad, Washington Monthly is atrocious.
chuck
We freaked out about DivX back then not just because of the environmental issue, but also because the technology wasn’t ready, nor was there any credible competition for the delivery. It looked and felt like movie industry consortiums getting together to screw us.
If iTunes screws with me, I could go to any number of other music stores (and now iTunes is DRM-free). Same story for movie rentals. There’s certainly legitimate complaints about DRM to this day, but the vast majority of people who freaked out really just wanted to keep copying movies for free.
chuck
@Jon H:
The Kindle actually does do cell-tower location awareness. Not entirely useful on BART mind you, since you may pass your location before it detects the change, but then again GPS doesn’t exactly work too well underground either. Besides, most people keep the wireless switched off when reading, because it sucks up battery like no ones business.
There’s not exactly a burgeoning app market for the kindle, so I doubt you’ll see that happen. It’s not exactly locked down very tight, but there’s no support for third-party apps on the thing either.
geg6
I am generally a pretty early adopter of new technology, especially if I can immediately see the value it provides me. That said, there are two tech items I have no use for and will never adopt. The first would be video or online games. Don’t find any of them interesting in any way, though I keep trying. Just don’t get it. But I am appalled at the entire concept of the Kindle and will never even glance at one, let alone buy one. Books and the act of reading are comparable to how others experience religion. Or an even better analogy would be great sex in that it’s a sensual experience for three of my senses. Reading, let alone reading Jane Austen or Jeffrey Eugenides or Carl Hiaasen or Stephen Ambrose (all on my favorite authors list), without the feeling of the paper and a nice hardback cover, the smell of the ink on the page or the slightly dry and musty aroma of an old and well-loved book, and the beauty of the binding or the texture of the paper or choice of font would ruin at least half (and likely, in the case of books not quite so beloved) of the experience for me. I guess, like with gaming, I understand why others would go for it but I find the idea a complete and horrifying waste of time and money.
Jon H
“, without the feeling of the paper and a nice hardback cover, the smell of the ink on the page or the slightly dry and musty aroma of an old and well-loved book, and the beauty of the binding or the texture of the paper or choice of font would ruin at least half”
Yeah, they romance you and everything, but when it comes time to move, where are they? They lie there and make you do all the work.
Also, there’s quite a bit of variety in the typography of Kindle books. The books I’ve read have all had different fonts – they aren’t all forced into Times or Courier. Which, actually, is not necessarily a good thing, as they aren’t as readable as they might have been on the page.
(The kindle version of ‘Against the Gods’ even had characters looking like they were printed on a machine running out of ink. I don’t know how the books are represented digitally, but it’s clearly not just a simple ASCII file or an encoded outline font.)
Tim F.
If the best analogy that you can find for books is sex, you’re doing sex wrong.
Jon H
@Tim F.: “If the best analogy that you can find for books is sex, you’re doing sex wrong.”
But what about all the little cuts?
tripletee (formerly tBone)
I’ve successfully resisted the siren song of the Kindle so far, but if they make it possible to purchase Kindle books through Stanza (which they recently acquired), I’m going to have to give in. Stanza kicks the shit out of the Kindle iPhone app, it just needs some of that sweet, sweet WhisperNet love.
chuck
What is with the romance for ink pressed on wood pulp? Does the author insist you read their work on the typewriter or word processor they used?
If the content can’t be good without the ambience of the physical medium, it can’t possibly be a very interesting book. The advantage of physical books for me is that they’re cheap and I can throw them around without fear, but it pretty much ends there.
(Doh, I just got dropped into moderation, probably thanks to “ambience”)
Jon H
It was kinda amusing yesterday morning on the Harvard shuttle. I sat down, and a girl I don’t know sat down in the seat beside me. Almost simultaneously, we pulled out our Kindles (hers first version, mine second.)
skippy
am considering, way back in the back of my mind, purchasing a kindle.
the pro: enlarging the text, which, at my age is a plus.
the con: buying texts instead of borrowing them from the library, which, at my income, is a minus.
tcolberg
I can’t believe that Project Gutenberg hasn’t been mentioned yet. They have all the public domain books you could ever want.
grendelkhan
No, not exactly. But electronic media has a shorter lifespan than physical media. It must migrate, or it will eventually degrade, in a sense. DRM ensures that you cannot migrate the data.
More concretely, if Amazon dies–or simply decides to stop supporting their old media–your content will become unportable. It won’t stop working immediately, but if your Kindle dies, or if you get a new reader, you’ll be out of luck. Your content has a lifespan as long as Amazon wants it to have, and no longer.
I still have some books I got as a teenager. (Ah, my moderately dog-eared copy of GEB, how sentimental is my attachment.) I don’t think there’s any sort of DRM-protected media I could have gotten then which would still be usable.
grendelkhan
I’m skeptical of claims about what Apple does or does not want; I know that they make extraordinarily well-designed hardware, but once they signed on with the RIAA et al., the mentality that they should be able to control what their users do with their own hardware seeped in. This mentality causes all sorts of lossage; consider, for instance, Apple breaking their debugging tools because it’s more important for the system to have a working DRM system than a working development environment, and the two are mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, not all publishers have been so recalcitrant to distribute their books electronically; consider Baen’s Free Library and its for-pay counterpart.
grendelkhan
@tcolberg: Indeed; note that you can download books in unencrypted MobiPocket format–the sort that the Kindle reads natively–with illustrations included, derived from the HTML version. Consider a random example–the “MOBI with images” link does what you want here.
(Obligatory plug: if anyone wants to help produce books for Project Gutenberg, you can sign up with Distributed Proofreaders and work on proofing and formatting the scans. Every little bit helps!
Will
@tcolberg
A lot of the free book sites are Gutenberg texts formatted for Kindle-friendly file formats, notably .mobi and .prc.
HyperIon
@Jon H: Wow. This is very slick. Thanks for the tip. This seems to indicate that I could manage her book list.
And thanks to others who responded to my request for Kindle info.
Jon H
@grendelkhan: “This mentality causes all sorts of lossage; consider, for instance, Apple breaking their debugging tools”
Saints preserve us from Cory Doctorow’s eternal pearl-clutching and exaggeration.
Isua
Seeing Wally Broecker name-checked just made my day. I’m trying to imagine Tracers in the Sea shrunk down into Kindle-size now.
grendelkhan
@Jon H: Oh, really? Would you care to expand on that?
Look, there are certain unpleasant facts about DRM that you apparently don’t like. This doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
DRM is fundamentally incompatible with general-purpose hardware running a general-purpose operating system–that is, what you or I understand a “computer” to be. DRM restricts what can be done with that hardware, and so it must, to a certain extent, break it. The example of DTrace is pertinent here, because if the DRM is to remain functional, you cannot snoop around software running on your own machine–it must be restricted in some way.
Consider Peter Gutmann’s open letter, for example. You can take for granted that many–or even all–of the bugs in Vista he outlines have been fixed, but please note how the crapness of DRM seeps into every corner of the operating system in an ever more intrusive and ever more doomed arms race to prevent the machine’s owner from using it in an unapproved manner. It makes everything more brittle, more expensive, and less functional.
You may very well point out that without DRM, content industries won’t allow their media to be played on general-purpose hardware. You may very well point out that only neckbearded Stallmanesque weirdos care about this sort of thing; normal people will be happy enough when something Just Works, and will never attempt to use their machines in a manner disapproved of by the manufacturer. This is very likely true, but doesn’t have any bearing on the above.
Jon H
@grendelkhan: “Oh, really? Would you care to expand on that?”
Doctorow is overreacting and exaggerating the problem with a supplemental performance tuning tool, dtrace, which is new isn’t even all that widely used because there are better tools on OS X for performance tuning. (Dtrace gives most people way more information than they want.)
Doctorow naturally declares dtrace ‘crippled’ because it doesn’t pick up iTunes cycles, which only even appear when you’re tracing the entire OS and all running processes, which most developers don’t do.
Oddly enough, most developers who use dtrace can get by just fine.
The origin of the “crisis” is that a Sun developer was butthurt and whining because his ideology was offended. That’s all.
And I believe Apple ‘fixed’ the ‘problem’ later anyway.
grendelkhan
But that’s completely beside the point! Whether or not the DRM is intrusive, it’s still there, and your hardware is no longer really yours. I can understand that you may not care about this, but please try to understand that other people might. And please try to understand that the “try to make water not wet” idea leads to an inevitable arms race, where ever more wacky and draconian measures are stapled to the OS in order to achieve an impossible goal.
I suppose I should add that the reason I get so crabby about DRM is that people seem not to understand what it really means. So you get people proposing “an open-source, relatively free community produced DRM solution that allowed real fair use rights”, which is about as sensible as proposing square triangles.
The long and short of it is that DRM decides what you can and cannot do with your machinery. Some of the things it prevents you from doing are likely illegal, and perhaps immoral. Some of them are not. Thanks to this ridiculous system, you may have rights under the Audio Home Recording Act to back up music you purchased, but you cannot actually exercise said rights without violating the DMCA.
Jon H
@grendelkhan: Um, yeah, whatever, spare me the sermon. I was commenting on the dtrace thing, not on DRM in general.
grendelkhan
@Jon H: All right. I can tell when I’m getting preachy (though it doesn’t actually stop me from doing it). The idea is simply that modifying dtrace was a concerning symptom of an unfriendly philosophy; that’s all.