My Thoughts on the Kindle 2

I have always been a voracious reader, since I was a child. If you go to my parents house, my mom recently organized all the books and there are at least two copies of nearly every one. Hard back and paperback, or multiple paperbacks. Why? I destroyed the originals, or often we lost them and had to rebuy them.

Books to me was a sure way of staving off boredom. I’d read during classes, on trains, in the car with my parents, on airplanes, wherever.

And books are a huge pain in the ass.

They weigh a lot, they fall apart, dogs chew on them, they take up space and they are in general not attractive to have around a house. We in fact, have no book shelves in our house for this reason. Dusty, chew toys and ugly.

Enter the Kindle 2.

The Kindle 1 was an embarrassment, I felt. I knew quite a lot of people with them, but they didn’t show them off. They hid them. They apologized for its very being: “Yes, it’s ugly, but I get a lot of reading done. It wasn’t a device you displayed proudly. It was like lugging a Commodore 64 around with you and explaining why you need to play Commander Keen in its original glory.

I got the Kindle 2 however, and it is one amazing device. It looks good, feels intuitive, is easy enough for my dad to use and “Just works.” And not only that, it has me reading a lot more. A few notes on it:

  1. The device fits into an average computer bag very nicely. It takes up as much room as a bigger moleskin, the charger is nice and small and it you don’t notice it’s weight. With the leather case, it is durable.
  2. I read faster on the device. True: without the overhead of turning pages, keeping the book open, ink and hard covers, I can blaze through a book at about 1.5x the speed I used to.
  3. It works really well on airplanes. United Airlines, in their infinite stupidity don’t have three prong power on most of their planes, except PS flights. This limits me to about 1.5 to 2.5 hours on the MBP, but a whole flight + some on the Kindle.
  4. It is the ultimate boredom machine. Hospital waiting rooms, meetings, whatever. My iPhone is still the go-to for this, but the NY Times and KindleFeeder + some books on the Kindle also works really well.
  5. I’m rediscovering discover of books again. I have a habit of rereading books ad infinitum because I don’t like the time, space and money investment of having to buy something that might not be good. Now I only have time and money to be concerned with, which for me is easy to deal with.

Now what can be improved? The screen could be better, benefitting from more contrast. It is also prone to having hotspots in certain types of direct lighting (ie, on an airplane). A color screen would be amazing provided the resolution and contrast where high enough. The thumb controller is a bit too imprecise for my liking, and often I will press up instead of inwards to select. The overall speed of the device is sometimes wanting, but it is fine for the most part.

I also really wish Amazon had an “upgrade” program of sorts for books, so that I could get books I already bought on the Kindle for a small fee even.

And one more thing. What can the Kindle teach the music business?

The fundamental thing I think it teaches us is that the user-experience matters just as much as the user’s desire for the content. If the Amazon store and method of getting content to the device wasn’t as good as it is, there would be an MP3 problem. I also think that for the most part, people will put user-experience for themselves as high as a commodity as the device itself.

2009
03/08
CATEGORY
observation
6 comments
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  • Comments (6)
    • Roland Dobbins
    • March 9th, 2009

    You should check out the Kindle iPhone app. No search, no landscape mode, no in-app book purchases, but if this had been available when I bought my Kindle in November of 2007 (200+ Kindle books ago), I wouldn’tve bothered with the hardware reader.

  2. I have one big issue with the kindle. Lock-in. You obviously were someone that kept your books (as am I). I buy mp3s over unprotected AAC when I can. Why? Portability. MP3 is a more portable format. What bugs me about the Kindle is that I have to pay to use the non-portable formats (PDF, txt) and I can only use Amazon products to read the formats I pay money for. DRM aside, if I’m paying for the material, I either want to be sure that I can use it forever (like a book) or that it is cheap enough that it won’t be so painful if I have to buy it again (assuming it is even available). Someday your kindle won’t work anymore, no matter how well you take care of it. Your books will always work.

    • Roland Dobbins
    • March 9th, 2009

    Use the (Windows-only; runs fine in VMWare) MobiPocket Creator to convert your files to non-DRMed .prc, Kindle reads those just fine.

    • avramk
    • March 11th, 2009

    the kindle makes reading faster, easy to bookmark, does it automatically when it turns off or you can do it. makes me want to read more.
    I am surprised that our house does not sink into the earth given how many books we have. we donated so many to the library and still don’t have any more room.
    kindle is also going green and the cost is cheaper, do not have to go to a book store, saves gas.
    incredible array of books to choose from and periodicals and newspapers (another paper elimination)
    it was nice of getting this for a birthday present, and it will make traveling much easier.
    echo on contrast improvement needed, but nice to be able to adjust font size.
    the cover and book light work very well.
    seems to be a tech invention that I am using. reaching for it, before my books

    • Al
    • March 18th, 2009

    Books are beautiful. How you can describe them as ugly is beyond me! Brilliant things which should be passed on and re used over and over. Unlike this piece of technology that will be obsolete within 18 months. I’m all for progress but find it very sad that you are so keen to do away with such a wonderful, practical and enjoyable item as the book!

    • glenellen
    • March 28th, 2009

    If you live in a small apartment, having a lot books is a problem due to space.

    I bought a KindleII guide books that tells how to get your PDF’s free. Check it out.

    So far, I really love mine, and have found many of the free books aren’t bad – depending on your interest.

    What do you think of the $9.99 best sellers? I think it a pretty good bargain.

Asides

    Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.

    via sojamo.de

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    ["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

    If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

    - #

    Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

    Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

    via everything2.com

    Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.

    via tuaw.com

    What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

    [From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

    - #

    Rest in piece little buddy.

    [From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

    - #

    Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

    [From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

    - #

    I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

    [From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

    - #

    A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.

    [From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

    - #