Hi,
First time poster here, though I’ve been lurking awhile. I registered today, specifically to post my review of the Kindle 2. I purchased it a few months ago--it was my first Kindle, I never owned the Kindle 1--and though I loved it for awhile I eventually fell out of love with it. In all the Kindle reviews I’ve read, on this board and in many other places, it seems to me that my specific concerns haven’t really been discussed. As a rule almost every Kindle review is glowing. So I thought I’d post my own review, from the perspective of a first time e-book reader who didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into, but more importantly, from the perspective of someone who has owned the Kindle 2 for months now and really given it a lot of use and lived with it awhile. Professional reviewers have reviewed it after having it for a few days but the Kindle 2’s flaws, for me, didn’t really become apparent--or at least too obvious to ignore--until I’d had it for a few months.
First, the pros. I always had a sort of obsessive-compulsiveness about books--I’m one of those people who likes them to look nice on my shelf. I hate pages bent back, I hate covers that are torn. Consequently I usually opted for hardcovers over paperbacks because they can stand up to some wear and tear. I’d take the dustjackets off when I read them and that way they stayed perfect. Unfortunately they were also very expensive, and not all books were easy to find in hardcover. The great thing about the Kindle was that it freed me from this mindset. I was able to get away from the idea of books as collectible objects and back to the idea of books as collections of words that told stories. The prices were nice too--as a rule books cost no more than $9.99 (and I refused to buy any e-book that cost more) and there were plenty of public domain titles that were either free or ridiculously cheap. The Kindle’s built in dictionary is wonderful, I love how you can simply scroll down to a word and the definition pops up. The search function is useful (though the drawback is we have to accept that damned keyboard--more on that in the “cons” section.) The e-ink display is readably clear and I like the variable text sizes. The screen is readable even in the sun. (I never had the problem with “fade” that some people on these boards talk about.) But the best thing about the Kindle, for me, is the way it felt in my hand. It’s light and you can read with one hand. I can hold the Kindle in one hand and press the next page button with my thumb. Not having to use two hands to read is incredibly useful when you read a lot on trains like I do. The Kindle is easier and more comfortable to hold than any book, whether paperback or hardcover, for the simple reason that you don’t have to hold it open to your page: it’s always open to your page.
These are all good things, great things in fact. But the cons, for me, outweigh the pros by far, and I’ve gone back to reading paper books.
The first negative I noticed about the Kindle was the selection of available books. Amazon had plenty of books I wanted available for the Kindle but there are plenty more missing, and it’s frustrating. Fatherland by Tom Harris? Nope. Anything by Ray Bradbury? Nope. I am Legend? Nope. How about Stephen King. Lots of his stuff available, but where’s Danse Macabre? Pet Sematary? The Dead Zone? Eyes of the Dragon? How about Robert B. Parker, Jim Thompson? A few books but most of what they’ve written is unavailable. The Kindle doesn’t do well with books that are part of a series, inevitably they aren’t all available. Roughly half the time I hear about a book I think I might want I check and it’s not available for the Kindle. That’s annoying.
And how about formatting? There are a good number of books available for the Kindle that I’d like to read, but not in the slapdash form the Kindle presents them in. A lot of those are public domain books, but a fair number are books Amazon charges good money for. The Douglas Adams books after Hitchhikers Guide are a mess (and of course Amazon doesn’t have his Dirk Gently novels available for the Kindle.) Some books seem to have paragraph breaks so large that it almost looks like you’re reading maybe four sentences per page. Amber Benson’s Death’s Daughter has this problem. There are enough formatting errors in even well-formatted Kindle books that every time I read a book on the Kindle lately I wonder if I’m not encountering errors I’m missing. I find myself wondering if the books are an accurate representation of what the authors wrote. How would we know?
Next up, let’s talk aesthetics. One huge problem for me, a problem I didn’t notice until it crept up on me after a few months, is that, damn it, books aren’t just collections of words. There’s an aesthetic aspect to them too. They come with covers. Sometimes they’re very nice covers, and I miss being able to see those covers. On the Kindle you either get no image for the cover or a grainy lousy black and white image, and the first time I walked back into a bookstore a couple weeks ago and bought a real paperback book with a nice colorful cover (Stephen King’s “Carrie”, and it had a great cover) I felt like I had come home again. I miss seeing covers. I also miss illustrations and the less said about the Kindle’s versions of illustrations the better.
But the aesthetics of the device itself are more worrisome, and now we’ve come to the big problems. First up, that keyboard. The buttons are too small to be much good to any man with even average sized hands, but a much worse problem is the wasted space. The Kindle is about eight inches tall but the readable display isn’t even five inches. Every time I look at that keyboard, the keyboard that shouldn’t be there at all, all I can think of is the wasted space. Amazon claims the Kindle is the size of a paperback book--and it is. But the readable display isn’t anywhere close. Every time I read a page on a Kindle I’m really reading a half page and the small screen is just annoying and the keyboard is just wasted space. I’m not a fan of the color of the Kindle either, because that drab white makes the screen look darker than it should in comparison, a dull gray color that becomes just disheartening to look at after awhile. The Kindle should have been available in a matte black color so the screen could seem brighter, and I’m convinced that would also take care of a lot of people’s issues with readability. A big part of the reason I went back to paperbacks is that I just got tired of the drab, cloudy grayness of the Kindle’s screen. It actually became depressing. And god forbid you ever drop the thing. It cost $359 (okay, $299 now) and that’s a nice chunk of change. If you drop a real book, nothing happens. If you drop the Kindle--and everyone is going to drop it at some point--you risk cracking the screen and now your $300 investment is damaged. I’ve dropped mine twice from about three or four feet. I’m not clumsy by any means. The second time I dropped it, I noticed a tiny ding in the glass screen; it looks like a stray dot of e-ink. My Kindle was in the Amazon cover but it’s not like I’ll be able to guarantee I never ever drop it again as long as I live. I’m starting to think I don’t want to constantly be risking a total $390 investment (with the cover) as I’m being jostled around on the trains. Drop a paperback? No problem.
There are a few technical issues that had me tearing my hair out as well. First, no folders. The Kindle is supposed to be able to hold something like 1500 books--and we’re supposed to organize them how, exactly? How on earth does Amazon expect us to make do with alphabetical order by title or author when we’re talking hundreds of books? It’s ridiculous. And speaking of aesthetics, it never failed to annoy me when I saw the titles of all my books listed on the home screen--cut off. If the title was too long for the screen--and it almost always was, there just isn’t enough room--then instead of wrapping and taking up two lines, it just cuts off. It looks slapdash and annoying. And how about the inability to ever delete anything? Any book you delete ends up in your archived items. But I wanted to use the archived items folder to hold the books I’ve already finished, so I can keep track of what I still had yet to read. I wanted to be able to actually delete the books I don’t want, especially those wretched-looking public domain books with the lousy haphazard formatting. Nope. No option. Why? It’s like a Windows computer with a Recycle Bin you’re never allowed to empty. It makes no sense and it’s yet another annoyance. Not being able to add custom screensavers without a hack is annoying, as is the threat that your Kindle won’t be able to process updates while the hack is on the system. Replacement battery cost is expensive, and if your Kindle is always on that means your battery drains even when you’re not reading it. (There’s a myth out there that in sleep mode the battery isn’t used. That’s false, I’ve tested it. I haven’t used my kindle in a few weeks, and I had a half full battery last time I used it. I picked it up a couple of days ago and the battery was completely drained. Sleep mode burns the battery slower, but it still burns the battery.) It’s possible to turn the thing off, thankfully, but good luck finding out about that in the documentation. I found no reference whatsoever to the fact that the Kindle can be turned off, anywhere in the documentation. I only found out about it at all from customer service. It’s almost as if Amazon doesn’t want us switching them off.
Finally there’s the philosophy of e-books. I didn’t know about DRM before I purchased the Kindle, and I have to admit that it annoys me no end when I think about how I don’t actually own any of these books I’ve purchased. All my money has bought me is a “license” to read them. I can’t trade them, can’t sell them, and Amazon can steal them right back whenever they want (the 1984 debacle.) Sure, they’ve said they won’t do it again. But they still have the capability of doing it.
At the end of the day though, the main reason I’ve abandoned the Kindle--and I have abandoned it, I’ve purchased a whole bunch of paperbacks the past couple weeks and I love them--is that it just became a drag to use. I like how it feels in my hands and I like reading one-handed. I like the dictionary. But the screen is just too small, and its drab lack of color and the softness of its dull gray display just got too depressing to look at after awhile. I missed book covers and crisp white pages. Add in all the other issues, technical and aesthetic, as well as the continued lack of selection, especially in books that are part of a series, and I’m afraid I’m done with the Kindle. Someday when e-book readers have nice big crisp color displays and the selection of books is the equal of what’s in the bookstores and the formatting issues are gone, maybe I’ll come back. But there’s no e-reader out there right now that can provide what I’m looking for. Maybe in five years.
--Mark
First time poster here, though I’ve been lurking awhile. I registered today, specifically to post my review of the Kindle 2. I purchased it a few months ago--it was my first Kindle, I never owned the Kindle 1--and though I loved it for awhile I eventually fell out of love with it. In all the Kindle reviews I’ve read, on this board and in many other places, it seems to me that my specific concerns haven’t really been discussed. As a rule almost every Kindle review is glowing. So I thought I’d post my own review, from the perspective of a first time e-book reader who didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into, but more importantly, from the perspective of someone who has owned the Kindle 2 for months now and really given it a lot of use and lived with it awhile. Professional reviewers have reviewed it after having it for a few days but the Kindle 2’s flaws, for me, didn’t really become apparent--or at least too obvious to ignore--until I’d had it for a few months.
First, the pros. I always had a sort of obsessive-compulsiveness about books--I’m one of those people who likes them to look nice on my shelf. I hate pages bent back, I hate covers that are torn. Consequently I usually opted for hardcovers over paperbacks because they can stand up to some wear and tear. I’d take the dustjackets off when I read them and that way they stayed perfect. Unfortunately they were also very expensive, and not all books were easy to find in hardcover. The great thing about the Kindle was that it freed me from this mindset. I was able to get away from the idea of books as collectible objects and back to the idea of books as collections of words that told stories. The prices were nice too--as a rule books cost no more than $9.99 (and I refused to buy any e-book that cost more) and there were plenty of public domain titles that were either free or ridiculously cheap. The Kindle’s built in dictionary is wonderful, I love how you can simply scroll down to a word and the definition pops up. The search function is useful (though the drawback is we have to accept that damned keyboard--more on that in the “cons” section.) The e-ink display is readably clear and I like the variable text sizes. The screen is readable even in the sun. (I never had the problem with “fade” that some people on these boards talk about.) But the best thing about the Kindle, for me, is the way it felt in my hand. It’s light and you can read with one hand. I can hold the Kindle in one hand and press the next page button with my thumb. Not having to use two hands to read is incredibly useful when you read a lot on trains like I do. The Kindle is easier and more comfortable to hold than any book, whether paperback or hardcover, for the simple reason that you don’t have to hold it open to your page: it’s always open to your page.
These are all good things, great things in fact. But the cons, for me, outweigh the pros by far, and I’ve gone back to reading paper books.
The first negative I noticed about the Kindle was the selection of available books. Amazon had plenty of books I wanted available for the Kindle but there are plenty more missing, and it’s frustrating. Fatherland by Tom Harris? Nope. Anything by Ray Bradbury? Nope. I am Legend? Nope. How about Stephen King. Lots of his stuff available, but where’s Danse Macabre? Pet Sematary? The Dead Zone? Eyes of the Dragon? How about Robert B. Parker, Jim Thompson? A few books but most of what they’ve written is unavailable. The Kindle doesn’t do well with books that are part of a series, inevitably they aren’t all available. Roughly half the time I hear about a book I think I might want I check and it’s not available for the Kindle. That’s annoying.
And how about formatting? There are a good number of books available for the Kindle that I’d like to read, but not in the slapdash form the Kindle presents them in. A lot of those are public domain books, but a fair number are books Amazon charges good money for. The Douglas Adams books after Hitchhikers Guide are a mess (and of course Amazon doesn’t have his Dirk Gently novels available for the Kindle.) Some books seem to have paragraph breaks so large that it almost looks like you’re reading maybe four sentences per page. Amber Benson’s Death’s Daughter has this problem. There are enough formatting errors in even well-formatted Kindle books that every time I read a book on the Kindle lately I wonder if I’m not encountering errors I’m missing. I find myself wondering if the books are an accurate representation of what the authors wrote. How would we know?
Next up, let’s talk aesthetics. One huge problem for me, a problem I didn’t notice until it crept up on me after a few months, is that, damn it, books aren’t just collections of words. There’s an aesthetic aspect to them too. They come with covers. Sometimes they’re very nice covers, and I miss being able to see those covers. On the Kindle you either get no image for the cover or a grainy lousy black and white image, and the first time I walked back into a bookstore a couple weeks ago and bought a real paperback book with a nice colorful cover (Stephen King’s “Carrie”, and it had a great cover) I felt like I had come home again. I miss seeing covers. I also miss illustrations and the less said about the Kindle’s versions of illustrations the better.
But the aesthetics of the device itself are more worrisome, and now we’ve come to the big problems. First up, that keyboard. The buttons are too small to be much good to any man with even average sized hands, but a much worse problem is the wasted space. The Kindle is about eight inches tall but the readable display isn’t even five inches. Every time I look at that keyboard, the keyboard that shouldn’t be there at all, all I can think of is the wasted space. Amazon claims the Kindle is the size of a paperback book--and it is. But the readable display isn’t anywhere close. Every time I read a page on a Kindle I’m really reading a half page and the small screen is just annoying and the keyboard is just wasted space. I’m not a fan of the color of the Kindle either, because that drab white makes the screen look darker than it should in comparison, a dull gray color that becomes just disheartening to look at after awhile. The Kindle should have been available in a matte black color so the screen could seem brighter, and I’m convinced that would also take care of a lot of people’s issues with readability. A big part of the reason I went back to paperbacks is that I just got tired of the drab, cloudy grayness of the Kindle’s screen. It actually became depressing. And god forbid you ever drop the thing. It cost $359 (okay, $299 now) and that’s a nice chunk of change. If you drop a real book, nothing happens. If you drop the Kindle--and everyone is going to drop it at some point--you risk cracking the screen and now your $300 investment is damaged. I’ve dropped mine twice from about three or four feet. I’m not clumsy by any means. The second time I dropped it, I noticed a tiny ding in the glass screen; it looks like a stray dot of e-ink. My Kindle was in the Amazon cover but it’s not like I’ll be able to guarantee I never ever drop it again as long as I live. I’m starting to think I don’t want to constantly be risking a total $390 investment (with the cover) as I’m being jostled around on the trains. Drop a paperback? No problem.
There are a few technical issues that had me tearing my hair out as well. First, no folders. The Kindle is supposed to be able to hold something like 1500 books--and we’re supposed to organize them how, exactly? How on earth does Amazon expect us to make do with alphabetical order by title or author when we’re talking hundreds of books? It’s ridiculous. And speaking of aesthetics, it never failed to annoy me when I saw the titles of all my books listed on the home screen--cut off. If the title was too long for the screen--and it almost always was, there just isn’t enough room--then instead of wrapping and taking up two lines, it just cuts off. It looks slapdash and annoying. And how about the inability to ever delete anything? Any book you delete ends up in your archived items. But I wanted to use the archived items folder to hold the books I’ve already finished, so I can keep track of what I still had yet to read. I wanted to be able to actually delete the books I don’t want, especially those wretched-looking public domain books with the lousy haphazard formatting. Nope. No option. Why? It’s like a Windows computer with a Recycle Bin you’re never allowed to empty. It makes no sense and it’s yet another annoyance. Not being able to add custom screensavers without a hack is annoying, as is the threat that your Kindle won’t be able to process updates while the hack is on the system. Replacement battery cost is expensive, and if your Kindle is always on that means your battery drains even when you’re not reading it. (There’s a myth out there that in sleep mode the battery isn’t used. That’s false, I’ve tested it. I haven’t used my kindle in a few weeks, and I had a half full battery last time I used it. I picked it up a couple of days ago and the battery was completely drained. Sleep mode burns the battery slower, but it still burns the battery.) It’s possible to turn the thing off, thankfully, but good luck finding out about that in the documentation. I found no reference whatsoever to the fact that the Kindle can be turned off, anywhere in the documentation. I only found out about it at all from customer service. It’s almost as if Amazon doesn’t want us switching them off.
Finally there’s the philosophy of e-books. I didn’t know about DRM before I purchased the Kindle, and I have to admit that it annoys me no end when I think about how I don’t actually own any of these books I’ve purchased. All my money has bought me is a “license” to read them. I can’t trade them, can’t sell them, and Amazon can steal them right back whenever they want (the 1984 debacle.) Sure, they’ve said they won’t do it again. But they still have the capability of doing it.
At the end of the day though, the main reason I’ve abandoned the Kindle--and I have abandoned it, I’ve purchased a whole bunch of paperbacks the past couple weeks and I love them--is that it just became a drag to use. I like how it feels in my hands and I like reading one-handed. I like the dictionary. But the screen is just too small, and its drab lack of color and the softness of its dull gray display just got too depressing to look at after awhile. I missed book covers and crisp white pages. Add in all the other issues, technical and aesthetic, as well as the continued lack of selection, especially in books that are part of a series, and I’m afraid I’m done with the Kindle. Someday when e-book readers have nice big crisp color displays and the selection of books is the equal of what’s in the bookstores and the formatting issues are gone, maybe I’ll come back. But there’s no e-reader out there right now that can provide what I’m looking for. Maybe in five years.
--Mark