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So I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday this year and now that I’ve taken some time to get a feel for it, I thought I’d share my thoughts a bit.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Kindle is the latest “e-book reader” from our friends at Amazon.

The attraction of the Kindle is that one can carry a huge number of books around in a package roughly the size of a DVD case with even more books on demand wirelessly from the online Kindle store. This alone is awesome! Add to it bookmarks, highlights, searching and on-the-fly definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ve got a powerful tool. Throw in syncing across multiple readers (like the new iPhone app) and it becomes almost insanely great.

But not quite…

The prevailing theory — written about at length on the web — is that the Kindle was primarily designed for book readers and this seems to make a lot of sense as the book metaphor is used heavily throughout the device. But what happens when an avid screen reader, a user — like me — who’s already familiar with the digital world, finally decides to, excuse the phrase, re-kindle his book reading?

Well, the result is decidedly mixed.

The need for speed…

First off face it, the Kindle, for all its coolness, is dog slow. Crazy slow in fact. Every action, from sliding the power switch to wake it or turn it on to turning pages or scrolling through menus, is slow. I suppose, if you had no prior experience with technology, like desktop computers or mobile phones, you might not notice the molassis feel of the thing (and I’m talking about the Kindle 2 here, it’s supposed to be faster than the Kindle 1 which must have been simply maddening to use) but being familiar with how technology is supposed to work, the Kindle’s sluggishness stands out. Even the iPhone — no speed deamon itself — feels spunky by comparison.

I don’t know if the speed is due to the device itself (perhaps somewhere in the firmware/software?) or due to the revolutionary “e-ink” screen or both. Either way, it requires some getting used to, some “re-adjusting of expectations”, and that’s not a good thing.

About that screen

The screen on the Kindle has gotten a lot of press because it uses “e-ink” technology and it’s easily one of the most talked about aspects of the Kindle. The e-ink screen is said to be great for reading and greater still for low power consumption. Supposedly, it is only when the screen is actually updating that it uses any power but when it’s actually displaying something, it uses no power at all.

While all that is pretty cool, and gives the Kindle an incredibly long battery life, the reality is the screen is no great shakes. It’s lower contrast than I would prefer (so much for “great for reading”) and did I mention it is very slow to update?

Furthermore Amazon gushes about the new Kindle 2 supporting 16 levels of gray. 16 levels of gray?!? When did it become 1990? My old Apple Macintosh SE/30 did that… and was faster at it too.

Nor does it have a damn backlight. Yeah, this seems petty, a missing backlight, but again it is something I’ve grown used to. I have no problem reading off my laptop, or iPhone, or a Handspring before that, or a Newton before that and all with a backlight. I do have a problem sitting comfortably down somewhere after the kids have gone to bed only to realize I need to turn on a light I never had to before.

So is it a book, or isn’t it?

The application of the aforementioned book model is rather interesting. On the Kindle there are no “pages” per se, only “locations”. The idea being that if you change the font size, which you can do quite easily, the page numbers will change but the “location” won’t. Ok fine, but why do the page buttons say “next page” and “prev page” if there are no pages? This hurts my head.

As an avid screen reader I found myself frustrated by the inability to scroll. I like to scroll through documents on the screen as I read them, after all this is the way we’ve done it on computers for years. Now, I get why you can’t scroll on the thing, the e-ink screen can’t update fast enough, but the thing is on more than one occasion I found myself at the top of a page and wanting to reference back only a few lines but this necessitated a “prev page” click. Because the page changes are so slow this becomes almost tedious — not at all like its physical book analog. And multiple page turns, to get more than one page forward or back, are just not worth doing at all.

You can see where the speed issue becomes a problem.

It’s really about the content

Ah the dream of digital content: the exact digital copies, the intra-book navigation from a table of contents, notes being automatically linked… all manner of digital nirvana, right?

Not so much. Like with physical books, in many cases there are different “printings” of the Kindle versions of books and this makes no sense to me. I still can’t figure it out. With books it makes sense, there is a finite number of copies of a physical book, but with digital copies why would you need more than one?

Unless maybe you were updating a book release with “bug fixes”, but now we’re talking about software and not book, right? Well, once you start putting features and DRM in your books, that become software. Tell me that doesn’t make your head swim.

On that thread, I’ve been surprised to find that all AZW files (the Kindle’s native file format) are not created equal and there’s no indication of the quality of the digital version when you go to buy it. You may or may not have a “table of contents” and if you do, it may not be linked. Chapters may start at weird places on the screen and what’s more stunning is the prevalence of hyphenation in odd places (like in the middle of a line). This is a dead giveaway that the content is not an actual digital copy so much as an OCR scan of an existing book.

Silly me, when I buy a Kindle version of a book, and from Amazon no less, I kinda want… no expect… it to be all “kindley”.

I’m wondering if an SPARS code type of thing is needed for the Kindle files where it denotes if a file is a digital copy of and OCR scan or an actual digital copy of the original files.

What about newspapers?

Well, despite my background and my profession, I must confess that I have not yet even looked at a newspaper on my Kindle. Thing is, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. The idea of a full sized newspaper reduced to the Kindle screen is comical to me. The idea of a gaggle of random stories (aka a newspaper) delivered to my Kindle magically in the night seems, to an avid online reader anyway, almost quaint. I’d be more interested, I suppose, in a Kindleized version of a web site, which happens to completely defeat the point in the first place. And besides don’t we already call that RSS?

No, newspapers on the Kindle are silly, leave it at that.

It ain’t all bad, tho

Ok, it sounds like I’ve bashed a lot on the Kindle, and I have, but it’s important to consider that the Kindle is very much a step in the right direction. I dearly love its size, that it’s a library in my hand, that I can pick up reading on a completely different device right where I left off on the first and that it’ll run forever on a single charge (well, compared to most other electronics that is).

True, much of the Kindle technology isn’t quite where it needs to be yet, e-ink technology certainly isn’t, but it’s damn close. Certainly close enough for the early adopter crowd (like me) to be thrilled to have one. I know very well that technology moves fast and I fully expect to look back two years from now at what will then be the comically out-of-date Kindle 2 and be amazed that we used to use it… and that we liked it.