The Amazon Kindle proved to be a great addition to my recent vacation.
I recently (as in, mere hours ago) returned from a trip to New Mexico to see friends and family. While there, I took with me a recent tech acquisition, the Amazon Kindle. For those unfamiliar, the Kindle allows you with doing away with carrying multiple books, as the device can store hundreds at a time. You can purchase books electronically, and their claim with battery life is that you can go days without charging. The device wildly exceeded my expectations.
I was immediately impressed with the quality of the screen. You can’t, unless you look really closely, see the individual pixels. The screen is an off-white, and the text isn’t black, but it’s easy to read. With six text sizes, I was able to blow up the text and read without my glasses when I chose to. The wireless downloading of books, which they claim takes about 60 seconds, worked as advertised.
I travelled for about 5 days. I brought the charger with me just in case, assuming that there might be a point where I needed to recharge. First, the device can turn wireless off when not needed. This is good for those reading on airplanes, as turning off wireless satisfies the airlines’ request for a device to be in “Airplane Mode.” During the trip, I read four books completely, and despite all of that reading, the Kindle still had half its battery life left! I was able to download books with ease.
One selling point of the current iteration of Kindles is the text to speech availability. While it sounds somewhat robotic, it did a passable job of reading the book aloud, and started where I last left off reading. I didn’t find much use for it during my trip, but it falls into the “nice to have” category.
A minor quibble is the selection of books available. Amazon touts a collection of 300,000 books, a collection that will no doubt grow as time goes on and the Kindle grows in popularity. However, a number of anthology series that I read were not there. The Best American series of short stories was not there, although another series I enjoy, Best American Crime Writing, was available (but not all years it was published). I did, however, find a number of books to enjoy, including a couple of volumes of Best Music Writing, Lewis Black’s latest book and a collection of short stories from Joyce Carol Oates, among others.
Another issue is the use of DRM, which is copy-protection technology that limits what you can do with the books you’ve purchased. Like iTunes, there’s enough breathing room to read a book on multiple devices (iPhone and iPod Touch devices, as well as multiple Kindles sharing within a family). But to get certain types of files to the Kindle you have to use their translator, which comes with a fee. They also can revoke licenses to books, as they have in a recent situation, without notice (although in that case they at least refunded the cost of the book). But that sets a dangerous precedent: what if Amazon no longer has the rights to sell a book? Will they revoke those? Or can you keep them? What if you want to redownload them? (Unlike iTunes, which downloads once and that’s it, Amazon promises the ability to redownload a book later if you delete it off your Kindle.)
All of the books I purchased were $10 each, a considerable savings over hardcover versions of the same books. Aside from the “green” step of not using paper, which comes with it a cost savings, it will take quite a few books to recover the price of the Kindle, which recently dropped to $299 for the standard version (a larger screen version, the DX, was recently announced for $489.)
The recent price drop more firmly puts it into the same type of category as another specialty media device, the iPod. Like the iPod, it smooths out what was previously a more challenging curve to move media to the digital realm. While there’s some strikes against it, it’s a promising platform, and one that I took a great deal of pleasure getting comfortable with over the past few weeks.
