Review: Kindle (Global Wireless)

Well, I've had my Kindle for a number of weeks now and I can definitively say that I made a good call in purchasing it. Currently, I have 200+ books stored on it and I've still got about 80% free space left, so I expect I shall run out of e-books before I reach its storage capacity.

I had my reservations about the black-on-grey e-ink screen. I am partially visually impaired so a high-contrast screen is a matter of necessity. Fortunately, the contrast is fantastic! Yes, the grey background took some getting used to but I think I actually prefer it now to the stark whiteness of fresh paper. Now that I've had my Kindle for a while, I find reading on white paper tiring, a case of having too much contrast.

I've been using e-readers for well over a decade now, pretty much when they first came out. I can remember when I first encountered a brand-new e-reader called Mobipocket on my Palm PDA. :) One thing that surprised me was just how comfortable a non-backlit screen was for reading. I can read for far longer with less eyestrain on my Kindle than on any of my backlit PDAs. I have heard that that was the case before my purchase but even so...wow! Radical difference here. Of course, this also means I can't read in bed with my lights turned off, so I purchased an e-Luminator2 booklight which allows me to read in the dark again. My first one was a dud (the parts kept separating) but when I called their customer service, they sent me another one with no fuss at all. So, two thumbs up for M-Edge - a company has good customer service is a company that cares for their customers and I shall definitely put them at the top of the list should I ever need products like that again.

Oh, I also bought a Latitude jacket for my Kindle which does its job of protecting my Kindle marvelously. I especially like the fact that they've got good, heavy-duty zippers on the thing. Zippers appear to be the first point of failure for most of my items, so it's one worry off my mind. The Latitude won't help if you drop your Kindle or hit it with anything pointy but it does prevent incidental damage from tossing it into your handbag. I don't know about you but I have tons of odd bits in my bag, ranging from harmless items like Pokemon books for the kids to sharp, poky hairpins for ballet. So, having some decent protection does matter in my case.

Back to the Kindle: the battery life on it is amazing. The caveat is that I have to keep my wireless turned off if I want that kind of battery life. I've had it for about half a week now and it's still on the 75% charge marker although I think it'll drop to 50% charge soon. For my usage patterns, I will probably be able to go a full week without charging and I'm a fast, heavy reader. There are many cases on the forums of other folks going nearly a full month without charging. I think that's a bit extreme and probably works for people who read slowly and infrequently. The Kindle draws power when either indexing books, using the wireless or changing pages. I read very fast and I read for long periods of time now, at least an hour a day, easily 3-4 hours on the weekends. Therefore, I draw more power from my Kindle than your average user. A week between recharges is very acceptable for me.

Being a Canadian resident, this means that many features of Whispernet (Amazon's wireless delivery service) aren't available to me. Things like the web browser and blogs, for example. The web browser is terribly slow, if accessing Wikipedia is any indication (yes, Canadians still do have access to the Wiki) so I can't say it's a major loss. Not being able to subscribe to blogs does hurt a bit though - I'm a heavy blog reader, which I use as colour commentary to supplement my daily morning scan of the newsfeeds. Amazon has a $2 surcharge for non-US residents when purchasing any books from their Kindle store. There's no way around it, even if you choose to download the purchase via your desktop Kindle. I just purchase the books and send them wirelessly to my Kindle as I might as well enjoy the convenience if I'm paying for it. I'm a bit miffed with Amazon over this. $2 per purchase seems a bit high even with wireless charges. I don't mind paying a yearly subscription fee for wireless Whispernet service for my Kindle though, should they ever change over to that scheme. Fair's fair - someone's got to pay for the wireless charges and I don't mind doing so if it's fair. Still...$2 per book (about 20% of the typical paperback price) is on the high side and I'm definitely not a fan of this surcharge.

The main thing I'm miffed about is the fact that US and Canadian publishers license their products differently. Finding an older book in Kindle format is tough enough. Unfortunately, there are many books on the Amazon store that are restricted for sale only in the US. I'd say that 3 out of 4 times I actually manage to find a book that I like in Kindle format gets stopped abruptly when I get the "not available in Canada" message. This is why I buy heavily from publishers like Baen books who are smarter than these ones who prefer that their product not be bought than to reform their policies. Let me be clear here: Amazon isn't the issue, it's the publishers of the titles themselves.

Insofar as I know, almost all Kindle purchases are DRM-protected, so they'll work on your Kindle and nowhere else. Should Amazon go belly-up and your Kindle dies, so do all your purchases. This is the major drawback between protected e-books and normal dead-tree books. There are apparently ways around that DRM but I will not comment on that rather contentious issue.

When you first drop books on Kindle either via the USB link or Whispernet, the Kindle will sense a new book and begin indexing it. When you drop a lot of books on it the first time (like I did, about 200+ books), the Kindle's responsiveness drops. I'd recommend loading all your books on it and then leaving it connected to external power for a couple of hours the first time you do so. After that initial indexing, everything is great.

The Kindle does have some weight to it but I got accustomed to it very quickly. The buttons get too loose too fast - most of my buttons already have some wobble to them and it's been less than a month. The buttons depress with a satisfying but quiet thunk sound. The screen flickers black when it refreshes but you get used to it. The 5-way thumbstick controller is responsive and very usable. The UI is decent but takes some getting used to. In short, the Kindle is functional with a very small learning curve, perfect for a consumer device.

Text-to-speech (for the books that have it not disabled) is decent albeit robotic. It comes in handy as the Kindle keeps pace with the vocal output. This means that I can read a book, switch it over to TTS then switch back to reading without losing my spot. Whoever designed this put some thought into it - well done, Amazon!

Bookmarking and locating sections in the books is...odd. The Kindle uses some kind of indexing system that uses two numbers. It's a bit confusing but as long as you remember the first number, you'll get close to where you left off. You can definitely bookmark pages and that's pretty easy to use.

In addition to books, you can also get magazines from the Amazon store. I have been less than impressed by the content. Not all magazines contain the entire print-version of the magazine, only selected articles. You don't get ads...but you also don't get any graphics at all. No charts, no pictures, no diagrams, which makes some content hard to follow. This may not be the case for all magazines but is true for what I've seen. Buyer beware.

Lastly, I'd like to call your attention to two things, dear readers: calibre and Baen books. If you haven't been to either, please do check them out as it'll be worth your time. Calibre is the best e-book management system that I've found so far. Baen is an excellent science-fiction/fantasy publisher that treats their readers with respect and doesn't price-gouge. Plus, they offer their books in multiple formats, all DRM-free. I love that...and I buy a disproportionate number of books from them. If you're an author, especially a new author, please take note: there are many who think as I do. If you want to gain a following quickly, go with a publisher who's smart enough to have an open policy like Baen. I, for one, will take a chance on a new, unknown author on Baen simply because I trust them more than others. If their customer policies respect me enough not to slap DRM or regional restrictions on their books, it stands to reason that they care enough about their customers to only publish the best. So, I buy...from Baen. And I have never regretted even a single purchase after all these years.