Kindle 3
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011I’ve jumped on the e-reader bandwagon. I bought a kindle 3 a few months ago, and it was totally worth the $140. Compared to the traditional paperback, it has some downsides, but it also has some serious upsides. I guess I’ll start with the negatives:
Cons
1) Cost. First you have to buy the kindle, obviously. Then, sometimes you have to pay more for the books. There are often books which can be had for $4 shipping from third parties on amazon, for which you must pay $10 (or sometimes a bit more) to get the kindle version. On the flip side, if you do have to buy it at the new price, sometimes the kindle version is a bit cheaper, but not much.
2) Tactile navigation. Sometimes you just want to flip through a book: jump back 20 pages, read a second, then jump back 10 more, etc. Or, you just know by feel about where in the book something is, and you open and start searching. You lose this completely with the kindle. You can go the the table of contents and jump to a chapter, and you have the added ability to do a text search instead of random flipping, but sometimes you just want what I call tactile navigation.
3) Resale/lending. I can’t sell a book after I’m done with it, and I can’t really loan it to a friend. Amazon has just started a new loaner feature, but it is pretty restrictive, and only available on some books (as the publisher wishes). Basically, you can’t do it. Honestly, the only book I’m going to want to sell is the rare high value one. Loaning is a bigger deal – I’ve already wished I could do this – but still not something I would do enough to really deter me.
Pros
1) Size. Some books are OK to carry around, some are big. More than one is almost always too much. With the kindle, any and all books fit into one slim package, which fits nicely into a cargo pocket, or is light in a backpack.
2) Convience. I never appreciated until I had it how nice it is not to have pages. You can set the reader down in front of you, without having to hold it open to your page. Outdoors when it is windy, there are no pages to get blown around. Page turns are just a button press (on either side of the device). There is never any excessive force required to open the book flat enough to comfortably read near the inner margins. I was surprised just how much nicer the kindle is to read.
3) Display. The e-ink display on this thing is awesome. I wouldn’t even consider an LCD display over this, color be damned. Easy on the eyes, comfortable in any lighting you could read a book in, never have to adjust screen brightness; it is also fine in sunlight. Not to mention the power savings. Interestingly, the display is never off. When you turn “off” the kindle, it just puts up a screensaver image until you turn it back on. You could remove the battery, and that screen will holds its display indefinitely with zero power. The only thing it really needs is color…but most books aren’t printed in color anyway.
4) Battery life. If you leave the wifi off, you can charge it every 3 or 4 weeks. You can travel with it, forget all about charging it, whatever. It is hard to run the battery out.
5) Dictionary. I’ll admit it: My vocabulary is so-so, and I don’t like having to find a computer to look up a word. With the kindle, I just put the cursor on a word I want to look up, and it searches for it in the installed dictionary, giving me quick access to the definition. I use this a lot. It’s handy.
6) Highlighting and search. Also handy is the ability to go back to interesting sections quickly. There are two ways I do this: a) Search the text or b) Save highlight sections. While reading, you can highlight a section, or add a note, and then recall those your notes/highlight sections later. It is kind of nice for someone with a bad memory, like me, to be able to finish a book, then look back at highlights to remind yourself of the interesting bits.
7) Preview. It’s easy to download the first part of a book, and read that before buying it. This is probably as good a marketing technique for amazon as it is a convenience for me.
Overall, it has been great to have. I’ve played with the sony e-readers a bit, and they just don’t seem as polished. The browsing is not too hot, but it can work in a pinch, and it can even be useful for reading heavily text based sites..news feed, etc. You could also use it to look up a wikipedia page…if for some reason you don’t have your phone.
Hacks
If you do have a kindle, and are feeling a bit adventurous: Install this jailbreak for custom screensavers, fonts, etc.:






