Amazon has debuted the sequel to its popular Kindle device, the first-ever portable book reader to capture the imagination of the general public.
Launched in February, the Kindle 2 looks great, is both sleeker and faster than its predecessor, and is astonishingly easy to use. But despite all that, the Kindle just can't improve on the experience of reading an actual book.
The Kindle 2 is, unquestionably, very functional. Without the use of a computer, the user can easily search the Amazon store, browse best-sellers or recommended favorites, and then directly download titles to the device, in a matter of seconds. Scrolling through books is a breeze, as is organizing them, and you can take whatever you've downloaded everywhere you go, whether it's on a train, on a plane, or on vacation.
Less successful are the Kindle-specific newspaper and blog subscriptions. The New York Times interface, in particular, is exceptionally difficult to read and navigate, especially considering that the mobile-specific version of the Times had pretty much been mastered years ago- and was free, to boot.
The Kindle, alas, isn't for everyone, and that's not only because of its $359 price point. Some people, myself included, would just plain rather hold a book in our hands and put it up on the shelf when we're done. But the Kindle 2 has improved on the original by leaps and bounds, and this skeptic could certainly get used to it.
Amazon Kindle 2
www.amazon.com/kindle
$359
New slimmer and sleeker design
2GB Memory holds over 1,500 books
Instant Dictionary lookup
Experimental "text-to-speech" feature
Check out video of two publishing industry insiders talking about the Kindle and the future of books or listen to the podcast here.
Companies Mentioned:
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The aesthetic issues are subjective and individual, but certainly important. The main substantive consideration is that the cost of Kindle books is binary: fiction is cheap, nonfiction textbooks and technical/nature books in general aren't, and the latter fare poorly on the Kindle with its inability to handle color and -- less well known -- the horrific quality of complex B&W images (e.g., MRI scans, maps of all kinds, schematic drawings). Thus Kindle is useless for geographic atlases (buyer beware!) or anatomy books, for instance. Also, the quality of the optical scanning (especially when it comes to foreign characters) can be awful. Finally, the "sample" feature sometimes provides enough information for an intelligent purchasing decision, but other times it merely reproduces the foreward and acknowledgements and translator's introduction, hardly valuable if one is previewing the latest translation of a great work of poetry. (There should be a "peek inside" or "surprise me" feature to obviate this.)
In sum, the Kindle is wonderful for recreational reading, and for readers like me who simply own too many books to move anywhere and are too lazy and arthritic to move them all, owning a Kindle allows me to have my cake (a huge library of "real" books at home) and eat it too (a giant but compact electronic Kindle library in my backback).
Finally, Customer Support for Kindle is instantaneous and awesome, even by Amazon.com's customer-friendly standards. For those who've battled with surly computer support lines and clueless overseas customer service for other products, this feature alone effectively reduces the cost of the Kindle, particularly for clueless new users like myself.
Be careful: The only option for buying books on Kindle is one-click, and Kindle's setup makes it very hard NOT to buy books: I've downloaded several by mistake, though I've
I understand why you would prefer the touch and feel of a bound book, but I find that I much prefer to read most books on my Kindle 2. For pure text it is just more convenient. You don't have to hold it open and a squeeze of a button turns the page; you can change text size on the fly, and if your eyes get tired, it will read to you. And you have in your hand literlly hundreds of books with the Kindle and more as you say seconds away.
But so far for technical books or books with graphs, charts and photos the old way works better. I am confident that will change in the coming months and years. The Kindle 1 and 2 are a great start in that evolution.
"But despite all that, the Kindle just can't improve on the experience of reading an actual book"
That of course is your opinion. I like the fact that I can have a book at the click of a button whether on the train, bus, the park, or at the beach. I also can immediately look up a definition of a word in 2 seconds.
I can carry my whole library with me in my laptop bag. I also like the privacy of being able to read whatever I want in public without everyone knowing exactly what I am reading.
When it comes down to it. If you don't buy more than 2 books a month, don't get the Kindle. If you are a bookworm, the money you save on books will allow the Kindle to pay for itself.
Just as the 8-track destroyed the record, the cassette tape destroyed the 8-track, the CD destroyed the cassette tape, the MP3 destroyed the CD. Same with the kindle in relation to paper books. Technology is always evolving.
I wont get started on the environmental conservation aspect of the Kindle. However, I myself was running out of room on my bookshelf at home. Now that is not a problem.
Free 3G wireless also knocks this one out of the ballpark. Sure everything is in shades of gray, but it is a book reader, not a PC. The electronic ink is easy on my eyes and mimic paper pretty well.