The Kindle (2007- ) is Amazon’s e-book reader. The latest model, the Kindle 3, is the size of a book and yet can store up to 3,500 books. Millions of Kindles have been sold. In January 2011 Amazon reported that for the first time ever it sold more e-books than paperback books.
The Kindle can show you any page of any book it stores by writing and rewriting a single piece of electronic paper. Unlike an ordinary computer screen, it uses no light at all, not even backlighting – just electronic ink. It is kind of like a computer-driven Etch A Sketch.
That means the battery lasts way longer and you can read outside. But even better you do not get eyestrain. It is hard for me to read something that is more than 2,000 words on a computer screen – I have to print it out to read it comfortably. Not so with the Kindle. It is just as readable as ordinary paper and ink.
The huge drawback of electronic ink, at least in 2011, is that it only comes in 16 shades of grey – no colour. Most pictures and covers look ugly and are not always easy to make out.
As a piece of engineering the Kindle is good but as a piece of industrial design it is terrible. At least the Kindle 3:
- It is way too easy to touch the wrong thing and lose your page. The page-turning buttons are on the sides – the very place where you would want to hold it.
- You have no direct sense of whether you are moving forwards or backwards through a book. Especially since there are no page numbers!
- It is a huge step backwards in book design: it is more like a battery-powered scroll than a battery-powered codex (a book where all the pages are bound on one side). That makes it hard to jump to different pages. It does not matter much for fiction or anything made up of short articles, like magazines and newspapers, but for non-fiction it is painful and slows you down considerably.
- The Web browser, rightly called Experimental, is barely usable. The screen is too small for the Web and there is no mouse or touch screen – just arrow keys. Ugh. Also, the Web looks pretty bad without colour.
On the other hand:
- You can get a Kindle with free 3G network access. Yes, free. You can get books, email and the Web pretty much anywhere a mobile phone will work. Mama always said, “Never turn down free data.”
- You can start reading a book within minutes of hearing about it, not days or months later. Assuming, of course, Amazon has an e-book edition of it.
- Most e-books are cheaper, about $10 (0.3 crowns). Most books written before 1923 are free or just a few dollars.
- You can search on words.
- You can read certain newspapers and magazines on it. The New York Times is hard to read in the subway, but not on a Kindle. But reading the Sunday Times on a Kindle loses something.
See also:
- O Mangue: Gringo Gear: the Kick-ass Kindle – commenter Thad’s review
- kinds of books
- How the Internet has changed my reading
- The New York Times
- article
- Jonathan Ive
I’m holding out on getting one of these. I prefer books & feel sorry for bookshops that might go under.
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i rave about the Kindle (a few times on this blog & nonstop to my family & friends). people run when they see me coming due to my Kindle obsession.
one additional drawback: page #s on the Kindle don’t match page #s of the actual paper book. WHAT’S THAT ABOUT! this is irritating.
yeah, remove that sh*tty internet browser feature & make the pages match the paper version. or keep the browser feature, but please correct the page numbering issue.
i do enjoy reading the local paper on the Kindle.
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oh! here’s an added a plus: Kindle books are highlightable, bookmarkable, & searchable which is great to quickly find your fav lines, paragraphs, bible passages, etc.
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Speaking of technology, has anyone heard of the iPod? I hear it’s this thing that lets you listen to thousands of songs. But can’t you already do that with an mp3 player? What’s the big deal?
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In the post I said:
Of course you need to buy a machine that costs $139 or more to read them. You would not start saving money until you had 30 or more e-books. If you mainly read books from before 1923, you would start saving money after like 10 books.
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@ serpentus:
As Apple tells it, those old MP3 players were much harder to use and so did not catch on. I think that is about right: most of the people I knew who had them were geeks.
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I’ve thought about getting one, but I enjoy the idea of building up a physical library of my own.
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@abagond: I do not know where you did get that map, but we’ve had 3G in Finland for years by now and are getting ready for the next steps. Despite all the negative pupicity recently, Nokia was originally a finnish company 😀
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typo: publicity
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I’m old-school when it comes to books…I love the feel of the pages as I turn them; that ‘new book smell’ from a newly-purchased novel, and immersing myself in the story while curled up by the fireplace.
Also, Kindle simply can’t do justice to certain books that, when you lay them out side-by-side, have covers that combine to form a larger picture! A Stephen King/Richard Bachman dual set of books comes to mind with that example… 😎
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Just wondering, how does Kindle work when you are reading it in bath or swimming pool or on the beach going in and out from the sea?
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I am unequivocally for books. I love the feel of books. The weight. The covers. The sound of the pages turning and the smell. I like the way they look stacked in copious amounts on my shelves. I am a bit leery of the Kindle. If you lose it, there goes your whole book collection. I don’t like the idea of my whole collection being lost because of thievery, software malfunction, mishandling and the plethora of other problems that I envision with this newfangled contraption. Besides, who doesn’t like trolling the bookstore or library and reading an excerpt of YOUR choosing and length at your hearts content.
No. I am anti-Kindle, Nook, Cybook or any other e-book reader.
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Co-sign Sepultura13…I love the smell and feel if books however, I’m curious about the kindle. It’s a reasonable price and it would be nice for travel. B&N has it’s own version called the Nooke(sp?) thats pretty neat. Comes in color too
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@sam & DarkBeauty:
You both addressed the other things that make the Kindle, and other e-book readers, less than desirable to me. If you drop a book in the sand, spa or swimming pool, it’s considerably cheaper to replace it, if necessary! 😀
@ Y:
I think I’m a semi-Luddite or something…I’m generally the last person to try some new technology; it took me forever to just get a simple pager, back when they were all the rage. I like my computer and peripherals to be fairly new, but I never feel the need to upgrade to the ‘latest and greatest’ the minute they come up for sale. Some of my co-workers have a Kindle and swear by it, so I think I’ll just enjoy using theirs when they wish to show me some cool feature on it! 😉
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I’m so glad to see that I’m not the only person holding out on buying a Kindle! I also love the feel of books. I love to smell them. I enjoy spending hours in a bookstore looking at book jackets and trying to decide which one to buy. I also write in my books, especially my Bible. I highlight words to define or write ideas that come to me in the margin. I enjoy making stacks of the books that I have read; don’t ask me why but it gives me a strong sense of satisfaction to see the pile grow higher. I don’t think I’ll be buying the Kindle any time soon.
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I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who once said:
“Will the computer make the book obsolite one day? Yes, when you can take it to the beach, read it so that half the page is in shadow and the other half is in direct sunlight and that does not bother you while reading, and then just drop it to the +50C degrees sand while you go swimming and then come back and pick it up with your salty seawater fingers, then aply some sunlotion and pick up the computer again and go on reading with those greasy fingers. And when you leave, you can put your computer into your pocket or throw it in with the sandy wet towel, sunlotion and other stuff without even thinking. Then I think, the book has a serious competition.” 😀
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I have a Kindle DX, Graphite, 9.7 inch screen. Before that, I used a Sony 700. Now, as with anything, there is good and bad. As someone wrote, there is nothing like a physical book. They are absolutely right. I have a library of physical books! However, I also like to read several books at a time and carrying them around is a burden! This is the ereader comes in handy. I also like gadgets! At first I was hesitant to get one until I got one. Then, I realized that this served its’ purpose for which it was, a dedicated reader. There are several sites that you can use to download books whose copyrights have expired(it varies from country to country, these laws):
http://www.archive.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
Now don’t get me started on the DRM question. When you purchase a physical book it’s yours, with the DRM, tha’s iffy.
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It is not an either/or thing: just like you can have both paperbacks and hardbacks, so you can have hardbacks, paperbacks AND e-books. They each have strengths and weaknesses.
It would be unwise to put your whole library on a Kindle or any machine. Machines break and get out-of-date.
As it is, I could not put my whole library on a Kindle even if I wanted too: much of it has fallen out of print and most of the rest is not (yet?) in e-book form. It would also be costly and pointless: my old books are still perfectly readable (QUITE unlike the fate of much of my music collection!)
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I love the smell of books and going to bookstores and all of that. So a part of me feared the Kindle. Those fears were overdone. The Kindle is more like those early MP3 players than the iPod. It is still easier to read a paperback than an e-book.
For me the main advantages of the Kindle are two:
1. E-books are cheaper, so it means that in the long run I can buy more books than before.
2. It is easier to read something on a Kindle than on the Internet. That is because of the lack of eyestrain. And there is plenty of stuff on the Internet that I want to read which will never get put out as a paperback or hardback. For YEARS I printed stuff out, stapled it and then read it on the bus or the train home. I do not have to do that any more and, in addition, it will be easier to hang onto all the stuff I have read and go back to it.
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Sam:
You are right. That does seem very odd.
I got that map from here:
http://ereaderinternational.com/tag/kindle-namibia/
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I couldn’t believe what I saw! I saw an ad on a magazine that manga now comes in e-manga? Wow! I never thought I’d see the day when manga companies would open up to electronic formatting. In case for those who don’t know, manga companies are VERY reluctant to change anything. It’s always been print, print, and print for manga. But in the past couple of years, online pirated scanlations have really hurt the manga industry.
The e-kindle is great for the manga industry. Manga volumes are not cheap and print prices keep rising. I think the industry will actually gain, not lose, fans with this technique.
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@abagond: ok. No problemo.
to all:
I am not against ereaders, they have their place too, but what I find kind of funny is the drive of the business to go paperless (it is cheaper to produce e-books) just like they did with cd vs. vinyl way back (for larger profit margin). And then came MP3 and all that and now they are wondering how the F with ended here??
The same thing will happen to e-books. Somebody somewhere will get that despite all the security measures and such and voilá: you start to have free e-books in the Net to be loaded to your platform, what ever it is. And the publishing industry will be again; How the F we ended up here?? “Piracy is crime, goddammit!!”
And some small nobpdy guy prints paper books and makes a living with it 😀
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Recently got one and I love it.
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Today I read that in the near future Amazon will give the Kindle for free just to promote their book store. Maybe this Christmass.
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Free 3G? that means you dont need a sim card? don’t pay for the bytes you downloading? or what does it means?
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It means you can go on the Web for free but you cannot make telephone calls. It will try to find a Wi-Fi connection first. If that fails, it looks for a 3G one.
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@Abagond
Are textbooks available for Kindle 3? Overall, would you recommend this device?
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@ The Cynic:
Overall I recommend it. It has strengths and weaknesses.
I personally would not put textbooks on it unless I was using them purely as reference to look up stuff:
1. I would hate to have to read a textbook on a Kindle – there is too much flipping around and the Kindle is bad at that. It will take twice as long to read. Also, sometimes when you study you have more than one book open at at time. The Kindle cannot do that.
2. It is hard to bring myself to buy a book that costs more than $30 as an e-book. At that price I want something I can hold in my hands. Only when I needed a book right away for work have I gone over $30.
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Here’s a nice little app for converting PDFs and Word Documents to the Kindle format, mobi. You add the downloaded documents to your desktop for temporary convenience’s sake. You can always move these files to a storage device or upload online to a cloud service or storage service(Google Docs, Azure, Evernote etc.) Click on the button add books. When the book is added choose the format(Kindle-mobi;Sony-Epub). Right click on the finished book in the main window and scroll down to ’email to. If you own a Kindle you have an account. The converted book will show up in your email library. You should be able to sync the book with your wireless! Calibre:
http://calibre-ebook.com/
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Anyone try the new Kindle 8.9? If so, impressions?
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During my last trip to Mainland China I tried to read your blog. No such luck. Apparently WordPress is blocked. Only Chinese blog sites are permitted.
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Some good friends had to close their black book store here in our community. Technology killed the bookstore.
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