Update 10/1/09: Amazon has quietly raised the price of most new books to $15. They are, more or less, a monopoly provider, so they can and no doubt will raise the price of books as they gain market share.
-
portability, the ability to carry a lot of text with me and read whenever, wherever;
-
syncing with iPhone, so that I have my Kindle books with me on the phone — e.g., waiting at the vet today I read some of the novel I’m reading, on the iPhone;
-
string searching within the text (but with problems — see below);
-
the ability to change text size: e.g., I use it on cardio machines at the gym and make the text large enough to see whatever the distance;
-
built-in dictionary: highlight a word and the definition pops up. For specialized vocabularly such as used in a scholarly book or textbook, however, it’s not very useful;
-
And price: $10 for most books from Amazon. But this varies: Routledge has started putting out scholarly books on Kindle an the prices range from $15 to $30 and more.
There are limits on what’s available. For my upcoming trip to Burma, of the fiction and non-fiction books about Burma that I’m trying read. only one, a novel, is available in Kindle edition. I’d really like a couple of the more important non-fiction books on the Kindle: easier to carry; easier to search for place names; and less likely to incite the interest of authorities who might confiscate those books as I enter the country.
-
the decontextualization of the content, and
-
the near-impossibility of highlighting and annotating in a meaningful way.
For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction. I would not use it for professional reading that I want to understand, annotate, and go back to. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only those I will read and delete.
The Kindle is, like a computer screen, a small window on the text, considerably less than a page, even of a small book; and suffers from the computer screen’s lack of context. It’s hard to see how a topic is related to others; to flip through a lot of pages quickly; to know where you are in the text; or see how long a section is. The Kindle has a progress bar on the bottom of the screen and the text locations are numbered, but it doesn’t give the intuitive sense of location that a book does. If I’m 70% of the way through my book – that doesn’t tell me whether it’s a big book or a small one, and how many pages that represents. It’s even harder to know how many pages until a chapter break or the end of a section.
It does offer the option of looking at a table of contents, and searching for text strings, and you can page through the text, but, again, it’s more like moving through an online document, although a little slower than on a computer. It doesn’t scroll, it pages. It’s quite fast enough for reading, but not for skimming or thumbing.
Although text can be highlighted or annotated, it’s slow and tedious. The Kindle control for highlighting text is a tiny button. The highlight itself is merely a light gray underline. I use a variety of kinds of highlights to mark my own texts, to distinguish major and minor points, outline the author’s argument, or number the topics or points made; not possible on Kindle.
Adding a note requires several steps: (1) hit menu key (2) use small button to scroll down to “add a note or highlight” (3) click (4) move cursor on page of text to where note should be (5) type on the tiny keyboard (I’m a fast, touch typist and this is slow) (6) scroll to “save note” on screen and (7) click. Once you’ve added a note, it looks like a linked endnote, a superscript number. You have to click on the superscript to see the note. Nowhere near as easy or as visible as, say, adding a virtual sticky to a PDF document, let alone writing in the margin.
String searching is useful, but is like using a book indexed by an obsessive-compulsive indexer. You have to (1) hit menu key; (2) scroll to search; (3) click; (4) type the term on small keyboard; (5) click “find.” The result is a series of 2-line quotes for every use of that term. if you can’t tell by that snippet whether a section is the one you want versus, say, a passing mention, and the term or phrase is used often, this could be a very long, tedious process.
Finally, a minor point but one that is getting more important as I have more books. Books on the Kindle are listed by auathor and title. Again, the lack of physical cues can be a problem: which is the skinny red book you used for X? The big textbook from Prof. B’s course? This may seem minor, but I find some of my Kindle books sinking into an undifferentiated list — especially the ones I haven’t read yet. The thumbnails of covers that Amazon uses on its site would be very helpful. For example, one of my unread books is “The Glass Palace”: is this a current novel I just read a good review of? No, it’s an older novel set in the Burma of the British occupation. (That phrase has significance in Burma.)
For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction. I would NOT use it for professional reading that I want to understand, go back to, and re-use. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only books I want to read and delete.
