My Afternoon with the Kindle 2
People starting getting their Kindle 2s yesterday, and the first media reviews ran yesterday too, so I'm hardly the first to report in, but I did get to spend an afternoon with the little machine a little while ago, and here are my first impressions, for what they're worth. (And you should be reminded that they may or may not be worth much to you, since I am, after all, employed by the people who make the Kindle, although I haven't had anything to do with its development. And further disclosure: I'm am at best a medium-adopter, and I don't yet have a Kindle of my own. For now, I'm sticking to the old pulped-wood books--even if that means throwing 15 or so--including all 1,000 pages of The Kindly Ones!--in my bag for a week's vacation, like I did last week.) For some other early views, check out David Pogue in the New York Times ("The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now"), John Biggs on CrunchGear ("10 Reasons to buy a Kindle 2 ... and 10 reasons not to": I love reason 7 on the second list: "Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can't explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can't. It's like explaining heaven to bears."), and, to really get an inside look, iFixit, where they got out their little screwdrivers and took the whole thing apart.
When I took the first Kindle home for a test run a little over a year ago, before it was announced to the world, it was a mystery: the first time Amazon had made a product of our own, and an experiment in a field--the e-book reader--that had been coming for so long that it was starting to seem like it might never get here. When I tried out the Kindle 2 (for an afternoon in a conference room this time), it was a different story. The Kindle has caught on, even, I think, beyond the expectations of the people who made it, and the question is no longer whether people will ever read e-books, but how will they read them. Using the first Kindle was almost a philosophical moment (what is it like to read a book on a machine?). Using the second (unless you've never tried the first!) is more practical (hmm--what's new this time?).
So what is new?
- The first thing you'll notice about the new Kindle is that it's slim and smooth. The first thing everyone remarked on about the first Kindle was its chunky, angular body, which looked a little like someone had gotten careless with a cheese slicer. The Kindle 2 is 0.36" thick, half the thickness of Kindle 1 (at its chunkiest), and has curves and tapers where Kindle 1 had lines and angles. As CrunchGear says, it could actually slice cheese itself. (The weight's about the same: the Kindle may have slimmed down, but it's all muscle now.)
- The first thing you may have noticed after you picked up the old Kindle was--oops--you turned the page by mistake. The Next Page and Back Page buttons, designed to make turning pages easy, made it so easy that it was hard not to turn them, until you learned how to hold the device. The new buttons are in roughly the same places on the sides of the Kindle 2, but they are designed so you have to press the inside of the buttons, not the edges, so you're not likely to do so by mistake.
- The new Kindle has replaced the old little scroll wheel that moved you up and down the links on a page with a "5-way button" (four directions and pressing it to click). There's a sacrifice in speed (the old wheel could move pretty fast) for the advantage of two dimensions (you can move both up and down and across now), which, for one thing, makes it a lot easier to select text for making notes or looking up.
- The menu button is now on the side, rather than something you have to click on the screen, which is a nice plus.
- The eInk screen is the same size as before, with a slight improvement in clarity thanks to a more detailed grayscale.
- Inside the Kindle, there are two big changes. One you might expect, spoiled as were are by the bounty of Moore's law (although it's still impressive): the old Kindle could hold "over 200 books," while the new one can pack in "over 1,500" (which is starting to sound like an actual library). Either books have gotten smaller, or the Kindle's memory has gotten bigger.
- The other big inside change could be a game-changer for some people--I'm curious to see whether it turns out to be. There's a new "Text-to-Speech" feature that can read every book (and blog and newspaper and magazine) on your Kindle on the fly. Switch it on, and it will start reading from whatever page you're on--kind of like if the lady on your GPS could tell you how to get to Staten Island and read Netherland to you as you drove. How does it sound? Not bad--it's a lot more fluent than you might expect--but not perfect. The pronunciation of individual words and the pauses for commas and periods are surprisingly smooth for the most part, but nevertheless, rather than the plummy British tones of, say, Jim Dale, there's still a strong, recognizable accent from somewhere around the moon Triton. Whether you'd get used to that or driven crazy over time, I'm not sure, but the hands-free potential for reading your books any way you please is very high. (And just like the adjustable font size, you can set the voice to read as a woman or a man, and to read more slowly or quickly than the normal speed (or as I came to call those settings, on Quaaludes or amphetamines)).
- But what may be the biggest change between this year and last is available to Kindle 1 owners too: the number of books on the Kindle has more than doubled, from around 100,000 at launch a year ago to over 240,000 (and growing) now. An ebook reader is only as good as the ebooks you can read. Not everything I searched for was there, but with over 90% of the New York Times bestsellers available, the gap between what you want to read on the Kindle and what you can read is narrowing every day.
Those are the main differences I could see between K1 and K2, but the biggest difference is still between K and what came before. There were I think four elements to what made Kindle work well from the beginning: the quiet, no-glare eInk screen (which it shares with some other e-readers), the storage (which lets you take a year's worth of reading wherever you go), the selection (see above), and the constant (and free!) wireless connection (which lets you zip a book to your machine in about 15 seconds from almost anywhere in the country). Those are the real game-changers, and they are the things, elegant new package and audio capabilities aside, that will still wow someone who's never picked up a Kindle before. --Tom
P.S. What did I read this time? Last time I ordered Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red. This time, having read so much about Donald E. Westlake, and especially his alter ego Richard Stark, after his death in December, I decided to order one of his recent Richard Stark/Parker novels, Nobody Runs Forever. Needless to say, Kindle fans and Parker fans, I had the book in 15 seconds, and about 15 seconds later Parker had killed his first man, a stranger at an underworld poker game who, it turned out, was wearing a wire.
StephanieInCA on February 26, 2009 at 11:54 AM
My biggest concern about the Kindle, aside from it’s weird, book-buring-esque name, is that it compromises the integrity of the written word. A printed book may be unwieldy, but you know that once it’s on your shelf, not one letter is going to change. Can’t say the same for the Kindle: http://urbzen.com/2009/02/09/amazon-kindle-privacy-fail/
Also, when I spill coffee all over a book, I’ve only ruined that particular book :)
Michael on February 26, 2009 at 04:58 PM
The thousand-page book you referenced throwing in your bag is not yet published. Is there any reason for anyone to believe any of your words? Even, that is to say, if you were not an Amazon shill?
D. B. Light on February 26, 2009 at 05:00 PM
I have had a first generation Kindle for several months and like it a lot. The incremental gains in Kindle 2 don't seem to me to be sufficient for me to upgrade though.
For the maladroits out there it's easy to waterproof a Kindle -- just use a baggie. You can even read in the shower if you wish :)
Only two things about the K-2 concern me. First you can no longer use an SD card to expand memory as you could on the original Kindle and the battery is no longer removable, so you can't get a spare. Those were attractive features of the first Kindle that should be restored on K-3. Other than that K-2 sounds like a good deal.
Jacob on February 26, 2009 at 05:09 PM
@Michael: Did you happen to click on the "About this blog" link at the top of this page, to see what group Tom works with?
I have a shocking secret to share, so scandalous that the Amazon shills may delete my comment:
Sometimes book editors receive early copies of books, so that they can write reviews.
Jamie on February 26, 2009 at 05:12 PM
Nice, Michael. Any possibility that a person who was given a Kindle to try out before Kindles were for sale might be given an advance copy of a book?
My husband got me a Kindle for my birthday last year. I absolutely love it, warts and all - and I'm totally bummed that it sounds as if most of those warts have been frozen off the Kindle 2. The only issues I have with my Kindle (Mark 1) are the inadvertant page turns (which, except when my now-well-trained fingers slip and I DO turn a page by accident, I consider to be more than offset by the ability to eat and read at the same time without having to hold the book open with one hand and turn the page with the other, brush my teeth and read ditto, etc.) and the less than easy-to-use keyboard (the buttons are hard to press). I take it everywhere; servers in restaurants ask me what it is, neighbors with elderly parents ask me to show them the type-size adjustment, my book club turns green with envy when I download the book we just-that-minute chose for next month, or search for a particular passage in this month's book and pinpoint it in seconds.
I love my Kindle.
Dumping coffee on it would stink, no doubt...
Tom on February 26, 2009 at 05:16 PM
Thanks for the backup, Jacob and Jamie. I may be an Amazon shill, but I've had an advance copy of The Kindly Ones for the past few months, as have a lot of other people in the book business, including the New York Times, which has already reviewed (and panned) it, even though it's not in stores yet. But, full confession: I didn't actually "throw" it into my bag. I kind of shoved it in there.
JasperPants on February 26, 2009 at 05:39 PM
Worst thing about the Kindle?
NOT AVAILABLE IN CANADA!
When is this marvel coming? WHEN!?
lee on February 26, 2009 at 06:38 PM
The kindle will have limited appeal to anyone who has to read a lot of books. It doesn't connect to the internet, won't (I believe) store music or videos, feature text messaging, and lacks other features that are staples in portable devices.
Flubber on February 26, 2009 at 08:15 PM
I want to like the Kindle, I really do. But $9.99 for a book download is utterly absurd. The publishers and retailers save enormous amounts by not having to print, ship, store, and return the paper books. I really think that should trickle down. As someone who has been involved with publishing and knows those numbers, anything over $2.99 for a Kindle-format book is an outrage, and no more than $1.99 for backlist--$.99 for public domain books.
The reason I never bothered with Mobipocket books is the first time I went to their site, they wanted full hardcover price for the latest Crichton novel. I'd rather have the book, thanks.
HatlessHessian on February 26, 2009 at 08:18 PM
I spent the past day with mine too. Remarkable. I didn't know about the text-to-speech and I'm shocked at how my 2 hours a day in commutes will suddenly be much more productive.
Per available texts, I'm also far from disappointed. Several texts on Baudrillard, several Heidegger works and a nice addition of the (very) critical overview to both Heidegger and Zizek, and countless other existential, post-modern and critical theory philosophers and I'm off and running. Yes, O'Neill's "Theory and Argumentation" (1917) isn't available, but I was more than shocked at the availability of works in a rather narrow niche that I peruse.
My only complaint? The 5-way button is slower than I'd like. I haven't discovered if I can accelerate it yet, and am assuming I haven't quite mastered its functionality (in one day, of course).
Book delivery via 3G/1G? Shocking. If you're a serious reader, you *have* to have one of these.
HatlessHessian on February 26, 2009 at 08:23 PM
Per Flubber's comments:
- I just purchased the entire works of Plato, Aristotle, etc. $0.99 each. I'm guessing Amazon's cost to process and deliver via 3G/1G cellular factors in there somewhere.
- Per $10/book being absurd, you apparently don't like writers much. I spend several thousand dollars a year (as a debate coach and risk executive) on books, typically at $22-$29 per book. Somewhere, I hope to god the author is being compensated. Public domain books are indeed at $0.99 as you wished, and authors still under copyright are more than 50% to 66% off. I'm rather confident at that level, we're not paying for paper anymore.
Now, if you're someone who reads 3-10 books a year and don't have a need for status symbol toys, it's probably not for you yet. For me, the savings is phenomenal, and better yet, I'm someone who always has 2+ books with me that I'm dealing with in my "spare time." Having it all consolidated into this slim little creature is more than worth the investment.
Jeff on February 27, 2009 at 07:18 AM
Okay, I'm reading more about this thing and getting interested. I'm still not sure it will replace my Palm T/X w/Mobipocket, but...
Will the web browser handle GoogleDocs? If so, that's a massive point in it's favor.
Lee on February 27, 2009 at 10:56 AM
Try Feedbooks for lots of free Kindle-compatible downloads. I list my novel MORTAL GHOST with many ebook sites, but they're just about the best - excellent formatting, multiple e-formats, and a truly friendly and helpful team who answer your emails promptly and clearly. (And they will be serialising my new YA F/SF novel CORVUS shortly.)
http://www.feedbooks.com/
ast on February 27, 2009 at 08:58 PM
Two things.
1. Do I own the book? Can I save it somewhere at home? Or do I have to be in contact with Amazon to read it?
2. Can I underline, bookmark significant passages, etc.?
icemonkey on February 28, 2009 at 07:40 AM
i have had my hand on the pulse of this technology for 15 years. it's also something i've been desiring since the 70's.
dear ast: 1. no, you don't own the book. it's a lease-for-life kind of thing. that was almost a deal-breaker for me, but i caved for two reasons. a. to encourage & support the advance of the technology, and b. because ownership of a material object is rarely my reason for purchasing a book. in fact, i have run out of room in my house for more print editions, and do not wish to weed any further. anyway. you do not have to be in contact with amazon to read it. it has 1.4 gb of storage -- room for 1500 books. that means the books are actually *on the unit* at all times, until you remove them. you can back them up to your computer; and so that you don't have to own a computer, amazon also keeps a backup for you in your account. so you can re-download unlimitedly and at will.
2. you can't underline, but i believe you can highlight. you can bookmark significant passages; you can also annotate (that's part of what the keypad is for). not only that -- your annotations do remain yours, storable for posterity as text files - and you can 'clip' and store significant passages.
i had fully intended to wait for 'right of first sale' to be mine; and color, for craft books and magazines. but my back is still feeling the effects of walking several miles a day between work and my train all last summer with a 3-lb book in my bag. life's short, and if the $359 saves me more than that on the bookcase line in my 'home furnishings' budget -- and makes it easier to read more, because i don't have to hold it open with my elbow while multitasking.. it seems like the gain will be worth the risk.
opinions my own. and i do not work for amazon; but have been their non-exclusive customer since 1995. and i have no intention of giving up print entirely.
Ruby on November 29, 2010 at 03:46 PM
Right now the deal breaker for me is the fact that the Kindle does not have the capability of running "library2Go" s downloadable service from many local libraries.
Also the fact that I don't find most of my favorite authors yet. Or if I do they want hardback book prices. Currently I go to used book stores and buy paperbacks for $3.00.
So Amazon is going to have to work on those issues before I buy.
The Nook supports Library2Go but I don't like how it feels or how you manuever around. So I'm not buying it either.
So for now I'm waiting for more improvements on the Kindle!