My Kindle, a review

Not long ago I bought myself a Kindle, Amazon’s eBook reader. Everyone who has seen it has been interested. What can I say about it?

It comes from amazon.com in the USA. It took about a week for mine to be delivered, with a phone call from Madrid to ask for information for customs clearance. In order to buy it you have to set up an account with amazon.com. [Update 15-9-10: It is now available from amazon.co.uk] I bought the Kindle 2, which became available in Europe last autumn. It is smaller than the DX, but is thus easier to carry around. There is a leather cover to protect it that is optional but is really essential. It is easy to attach and remove the cover.

Books can be bought in seconds. The device connects to the mobile phone system – there is no charge for this – so books can be bought immediately and no WiFi connection is required. The books are bought through the amazon.com account that was set up when the thing was bought. The purchase is done directly from the Kindle and the book is delivered immediately. There is the possibility of recalling an order but if you make a mistake and don’t cancel it straight away, you’re stuck with what you’ve bought. On the other hand, there is the facility of getting a free sample of the book. This depends on the publisher. The sample for the Richard Hannay collection has all of The Thirty-Nine Steps and a few chapters of Greenmantle, while the Jack London Collection has a number of stories but none of his major works. In one case I bought a book (Johnson’s Dictionary) only to find that it was not the whole work but a short part of the Introduction. I wrote a customer review explaining this, and I have seen a review for another book making the same point. It is worth looking at the reviews and the star rating before committing yourself.

However, the books are not expensive: the complete works of Shakespeare for about two euros, for example. Gibbon, Austen, Trollope, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle are there for about the same price. These, of course, are out of copyright and are available from Project Gutenberg for nothing except the effort of finding and downloading them. Copyrighted work is obviously more expensive: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is available for $14.74 (about 10 euros). Currently there are 362,679 books available. Most of them are in English but I have found Don Quijote in Spanish. As with any other way of selling books, it is the publisher who decides which books to make available and with which features.

Kindle uses the iTunes file-purchasing model: you get a file that can only be read on a Kindle but that is not locked, i.e. it can be transferred to any other Kindle. That is bad news for people concerned about their intellectual property rights, but combined with low prices (bad news for authors and publishers) the risk of illegal file swapping may also be low. Kindle can read mobi eBook files that are not DRM-protected. This is a system (digital rights management) that locks a file to a computer; for example, you can get a pdf file that can only be read by a special Adobe reader on the computer for which it is registered. The Kindle can’t open such protected files, though doc, docx and ordinary pdf files can be uploaded from a computer. The Kindle appears as another hard drive and files can be transferred in the normal way, to make backups for example. You can also put your own files on your Kindle. This is a useful way of having them easily available but I have found two drawbacks. A pdf file appears as a picture with the whole page on the screen, which makes the text small and hard to read. The screen can be rotated to a landscape presentation but that doesn’t always solve the problem and it makes the buttons inconvenient to access. Also, a picture pdf can’t be searched. As for doc files, these appear on the screen and can be used just as any other book, changing font size and searching, but in the case of my own books the phonetic symbols do not appear correctly. This is a serious problem as it makes the books impossible to market as they are, but I hope that there is a solution. I have seen that Greek characters appear correctly (curiously, with the exception of rho) in Johnson’s Dictionary.

The Kindle’s home screen displays the items under Books, Subscriptions, Personal Docs (ones you have uploaded yourself) or All My Items. They can be sorted by Most Recent First, Title or Author. The author sorting depends on how the file has been made; sometimes it sorts by forename and sometimes by surname. This can’t be changed as it is in the file’s metadata. Nor is it possible to change the title of a book or to change the upper case in which some have been prepared by changing the filename. However, books published by modern commercial publishers seem to have been done quite well. There is a freeware application called Calibre that allows you to prepare your own files in a format that includes such data.

If you delete a book that you have bought, it goes into Archived Items. These are stored by Amazon and can be retrieved at any time, so if you run out of space on your Kindle, you have backup storage capacity. The Kindle itself has about 1.5 Gb of space; Shakespeare occupies about 5 Mb, so space is not a big problem. It arrives with an American flat-pin plug, which is useless here. It charges through a USB port from a computer and so should in theory charge from a mains/USB adaptor but I have never got this option to work properly. It charges in a few hours and the charge lasts for several days, depending obviously on how much you use it. The wireless connection uses more power than just reading it, and turning the wireless option off can extend battery life. Like any electrical device it has to be turned off while a plane is taking off or landing, and the wireless connection must be turned off during all the flight as it is a mobile phone. The buttons to change pages and move around the system work easily and page-turning is fast enough to ensure unbroken reading.

The Kindle has loudspeakers; it can read books that are enabled for text-to-speech. The synthesised voice is a bit flat but does have more intonation than I expected. It is obviously intended for blind users. I don’t think that it is expected to compete with audio books read by professionals*. It is possible to upload mp3 files to have music while you are reading, but this is very primitive; it plays the files in the order in which you upload them and there is no way of displaying the music files on the Kindle screen. However, this is labelled as being in their Experimental section, so we will see what happens. This section includes its web browser, which sometimes works – you can use Wikipedia – and sometimes puts up a notice that web browsing is not available in all countries. The Kindle offers subscriptions to newspapers. When I was in Britain for a fortnight at Christmas I received El País every morning on my Kindle.

So at last to what one friend said was the brutal question: Would I rather read this or a paper book? In fact though it’s a non-question. It’s like asking whether I prefer eating cheese or pears; each has its place. Of course I would rather read a fine hardback book when I am sitting comfortably at home but when I am away it is a different matter. You can carry a book with you, sure; sometimes it may be bulky but you can do so. But if you’re going away for more than a few days, you either take a big pile of books, or you buy books en route and bring them back, or you do without. If you have Kindle, you don’t have just one book; you have a considerable library that you can dip into as the mood takes you and that you can extend if you wish. When I was in Britain at Christmas, an experience that is usually a cultural desert with wall-to-wall Celebrity Mastermind as the intellectual high point, I was able to read through all of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay stories. Well, not all in fact because I was only halfway through The Island of Sheep when we came back. I went to my bookshelves and took down the book to finish it on paper. After a short time I realised that the old paperback with the stiff spine was less comfortable to read than the Kindle, so I went back to my eBook version and some sorely-needed space has been created on my bookshelves as those five books are sent to the second-hand book sale. Another advantage of a Kindle: Hamlet was on TV at Christmas and I could follow the text on the Kindle. As usual the play was cut and would have been hard to follow on paper, but the Kindle’s search facility got me back to the right place easily enough. But I did find a limitation of the Kindle. In the fight scene at the end of Hamlet Gertrude says of her son ‘He’s hot and scant of breath.’ Sadly, this has been scanned and published as ‘He’s fat and scant of breath.’ Scanning faults may be amusing but they can cause serious problems in searching for text. Their prevalence depends on the quality of the text submitted by the publisher

With Kindle you can search text by entering the search term through the QWERTY keyboard. The keys are small but manageable, even with my difficult left hand (I broke my wrist badly in 2003). You can also make notes, highlight text, and set bookmarks. These notes are accessible from a computer via USB, so here is a handy way of extracting text from a book on a Kindle for quoting in a computer file.

The Kindle reading display is black on grey. This seems surprising at first but it works, and no doubt considerable testing was done to find a good combination. I find it easy and pleasant. There is one important thing that must be made very clear. It uses a display through electronic ink which is read with reflected light like normal paper and ink. It does not have a backlit display like a computer. It can’t be read in the dark but it does not induce eye-strain as lengthy use of a computer screen does. The screen display does not include a clock, which seems a bit odd. Maybe this will be remedied when the software is updated, which happens occasionally. Also, books do not have conventional pages. This is because the text size can be varied. The text is divided into Locations, which are roughly a sentence in length, and a bar at the bottom of the screen tells you which Locations you have on-screen and what proportion of the whole book you have read. You can go to any location by number. There is a settings page where you can put personal data to identify the Kindle as yours and so that, if you lose it, it might (perhaps) be returned.

A very new feature is Kindle for PC (I think there’s a Mac equivalent). With this you can see the Kindle books you have bought on your computer screen. When they open, they show the last page you read on your Kindle. But not only that – when you go back to your Kindle, it knows where you have got up to on your computer! For me at least that is a kind of magic but I suppose that younger people see it as just the way things naturally ought to be.

All in all I am positive about the Kindle. For the publisher and author it seems to have certain drawbacks (pricing and copyright protection) but the whole eBook market is in a state of uncertainty. For the reader it offers enormous possibilities, which can only improve in the future.

Finally, I only discuss the Kindle because I don’t know about other eBook readers. I have seen some that seem to have no keyboard, but maybe it comes up on a touch-screen. A reader with no easy input facility would be useless. I know too that the Apple iPad has no USB connection, which for me would be a decisive factor against it.

 

(Title photo Wikipedia)

*Since writing this I have downloaded Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in French. The voice synthesiser goes for it but doesn’t know that it should be speaking French. The result is sad, bewildering or hilarious depending on your point of view.

Comments

[MM]

Thanks very much for the detailed report.
But when I read Hamlet it really was 'He's fat and scant of breath' - one of those words the footnotes always comment on. Don't you think they simplified it for the TV audience?

[Peter Harvey]

Margaret,

Thank you very much for that comment. I go to one print Shakespeare and I find 'fat' glossed as 'dull'. In another I find it, with special reference to Hamlet, as 'hot', which may just be trying to make things look right. The OED offers nothing for 'fat' that might mean 'hot'. There is an interesting theory here http://preview.tinyurl.com/yzzsr8f.

[Brian Barder]

Margaret pipped me to the post about "fat"!

I have done some specimen reading on Owen's Kindle and I was much impressed. If I travelled now as much as I used to, especially by air, I wouldn't hesitate about buying one. But as it is I have plenty of printed books at home that I still haven't read and at home I have no real need of an e-book.

[Peter Harvey]

I do find it useful but, while I can justify it (to the tax people as well as to myself) on the grounds that as an author and self-publisher I need to have a look at one, I am not sure that I would have bought it otherwise.

[t-shirt mafia]

I have one and It's very useful for me as I travel a lot but I think the price is a little too high !