24 hours with an Amazon Kindle 3 – a quick review
Posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 11:03pm. #
It seems only weeks ago that I was reviewing a BeBook Mini ebook reader here; so what on earth possessed me to buy an Amazon Kindle
Well, first – the justification.
I’ve used my little BeBook mini a lot. An awful lot. Every trip into London has been spent with my nose in a book – whether Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (just excellent, by the way), the usual Sherlock Holmes mysteries, or Stieg Larsson trilogy (downloaded illegally, but I own the printed books). I’ve purchased one book – an Android programming book. I’ve used it to hold my notes when speaking at conferences. It lasts forever. It’s a marvellous device.
The downsides are relatively few: but all surround the availability and price of content. The likes of Waterstones and Foyles do sell eBooks, but at prices that are the same – and sometimes more expensive – than the print versions. To download these requires the PC open, with the myriad of distractions it offers. And the 5-inch screen – not quite large enough – was just too small to comfortably read freely-available Google books in PDF format.
The new Kindle offers respite from these downsides. The prices are very cheap. That new Tony Blair book, A Journey? It’s £12.50 (down from £25) on Amazon.co.uk in hardback
Something else I wasn’t too aware of – Amazon.co.uk offer samples. The first chapter is free to read – they’re hoping that it hooks you in and that you buy the rest of the book. This is a wonderful idea, and I suspect will be very costly to my wallet; it certainly worked in the case of the Blair book, which I found fascinating (never having read a politician’s autobiography before).
There will always be the curmudgeons who want a proper paper book; but, for me, the above two points outweigh the undeniable niceness of a paper product in your hand. Cheap books that you can start reading before you buy them? Count me in. And there’s nothing to stop you buying the proper paper books if you want to.
So: to the device.
I’m sure you’ve read the other reviews, so I’ll not bore you with details you could read on the product info page
My initial reaction was that it’s very well built. It charges using a micro-USB: the same as my mobile phone (hurray!). The power button is an annoying slidey one of the type loved by Sony for some inexplicable reason and loathed and hated by anyone with common sense; but even this feels expensive, not cheap – even though all indications are that this is a unit that’s been built for volume, not luxury. The unit is all nicely rounded, and sits well in the hand. (The plastic is a bit too easy to scratch though. Buy a case.)
I’ve been awed by ePaper (or whatever we’re supposed to call the screen) already; but the Kindle’s contrast is excellent when compared to the BeBook: black is nicely dark, and the screen is nicely light. It’s very easy to read – and really comes into its own outside.
The inbuilt wifi (I just went for the wifi version – couldn’t see the point in the £50 for 3G) is dangerous. One click of the clicky thing, and you can buy a book – no passwords, no credit card information, nothing; it comes preset to your Amazon account, y’see. (Incidentally, you can cancel a purchase just as easily, so don’t panic). The inbuilt (experimental) browser seems to do a moderately good job should I wish to log into a free wifi hotspot like The Cloud in the pub; and it connected quickly and flawlessly to the wifi networks I have access to.
Ah, yes, the browser. This was another justification for buying the device. I reckoned that it might be a perfect Google Reader client for sitting outside and catching up on the world. It uses Webkit, so renders quite well; and the standard Google Reader website works acceptably on it (keyboard shortcuts and everything). As a browser, it’s adequate, though. Yes, it works – the BBC News website (bookmarked on the device at the now-defunct news.bbc.co.uk URL) renders decently enough once zoomed in; but it’s fairly slow. An iPad this isn’t. Mind you, at £109, you’re probably not expecting it to be.
So, to the book reading experience.
A genuine Kindle edition book works well: you have a surprising amount of control over the text density, line height, and so on. A neat trick is moving the cursor down to a word you don’t understand (“toper”, in my case) and a dictionary definition pops up and helpfully tells you that it’s a person who drinks a lot. Highlight a sentence or two, and you can save a quote in your own Amazon account – or hit ‘share’ to publish it to Twitter, like this. Page turns are snappy – far faster than the BeBook, though the speed didn’t worry me. The page-turn buttons confused me at first (I thought the left-hand one went backwards), but turning the pages is now second-nature. It’s an enjoyable experience.
The font geek in me is disappointed at the lack of embedded fonts for books. Everything is rendered in a standard Amazon Kindle font (which looks like it’s Caecilia). I can change this to a slightly condensed version (which is what you see above), or a variant of Helvetica, but that’s it. The choice of typeface in a book is part of the book’s charm; and it’s disappointing that Amazon deem it unimportant.
However, all this changes when you try to read a PDF on the device – for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Follow that link and you’ll see a wonderful old book, owned by someone called Russell Gray in February 1884, and now the property of Harvard. Download the PDF, and stick it onto the Kindle, and you still get this old feel. Unlike the BeBook, however, the Kindle copes admirably with this format: pages load in less than a second (unlike the BeBook, which took four seconds or so). And – more importantly for me – the extra inch of screen makes the facsimile much clearer to read. If only I could get rid of the progress bar at the bottom it would be clearer still. Please, Amazon?
Finally, I haven’t had it long enough to fully comment on the battery – only to say that it looks significantly worse than the BeBook; but then, that wifi doesn’t come cheap. You can turn the wifi off in the menu – and I have – but it looks as if it’ll still outlast the longest flight possible.
Oh, and if you’ve got a Kindle 3 already? Go to the home page, and hold down Shift + Alt + M for a little easter egg… (grin)
So far, then: most impressed.
As per my disclosure, links to Amazon in this article are affiliate links. Products won’t cost you any more as a result, and I might earn enough to buy a small pint of very cheap beer.
Tom
Steve
B Johnson
Paul
I don’t mind being called a curmudgeon.
By the way James, when you’ve finished reading Blair’s book, will you lend it to me? It’s not full of DRM that prevents this is it?
In theory, I have nothing against ebook readers per se. If I was a student who had vast amounts of reading to do, they’d make sense… As long as I didn’t plan on selling them on to subsidise the purchase of my following year’s books that is.
If books are as disposable as yesterday’s newspapers to you, then that also makes sense.
I’m sure it’s a lovely device and I look forward to playing with someone else’s one.
But I’m not convinced we’re there as a technology quite yet. There’s obviously no colour which quite a lot of books have, and typefaces as well as the way text is justified is incredibly important yet terrifically hard to do (Word makes it look easy, but then most Word documents don’t look as nice as a properly typeset book).
And DRM remains a complete no-no for me. I wouldn’t buy music with DRM, I haven’t bought video with DRM, and I won’t be buying books with DRM. Are you selling me the book or a single-user licence to read a book?
Still it’s interesting to see Amazon advertising it on TV isn’t it? Although anyone who takes any electronic device onto the beach is really asking for trouble.
It doesn’t crash does it James?