What Recession? (My Kindle 2 Review)

My life revolves around technology. I have more hard drive storage space in my house than many small businesses and own more computers than most third world countries. I love electronic gadgets, videogames, arcade games, computers, and technology in general. Hell to me isn’t a fiery place run by a guy wearing red tights with horns and a pitchfork; it’s being stuck out in the woods, far from electricity and my beloved Internet.

But it’s not just technology; I love gadgets, especially those that integrate into my daily life. I enjoy road trips exponentially more since buying a GPS. I exercise more since buying a better mp3 player. I watch more television now that I can record programs on my PVR. I spend more time with my kids now that I have a better digital camera. (Just kidding on that last one …)

What I’m doing here is trying to rationalize and justify to both you and myself the purchase of a a $400 electronic eBook reader, the Amazon Kindle 2 — especially in the middle of a recession by a guy who, quite frankly, isn’t known for reading a lot of books. Oh, I read books; I have a stack of networking manuals, programming tomes and a pile of security-related journals surrounding me, but somewhere life’s journey I got away from something I did a lot as a kid, and that’s reading books for entertainment.

Enter the Kindle 2

The Kindle 2 (as previously stated) is an electronic reading device. It allows you to read electronic books (eBooks) in various formats. It has wireless connectivity for connecting to the Amazon Kindle bookstore (and “the net”), and a USB connection for transferring other data.

After opening the box and removing the Kindle 2 from its packaging I was amazed by how thin it was. The unit is less than half as thick as the original Kindle and comes in at 0.36 of an inch thick; lying side-by-side, it’s not even as thick as a standard pencil. The unit’s dimensions are 8″ tall and 5″ wide, but the screen is much smaller with a vertically oriented 3.5″ x 4.8″ screen (imagine a 3×5 index card turned sideways). For $359, the unit does not come with a cover or carrying case, something I (as someone who has broken a Palm 650 phone screen and scratched many other phone/mp3/camera screens) consider to be mandatory. I wouldn’t dream of carrying the Kindle around without tossing it in a Kindle-approved case, especially after reading this guy’s review about how he scratched his Kindle 2’s screen almost immediately. Fortunately for me, Amazon (the maker of the Kindle) was kind enough to suggestive sell me their official Kindle 2 leather bound carrying case for an additional $30. Add shipping, and you’re looking at $400 before ever buying a book.

Physically speaking, the Kindle 2 (installed in the Amazon case) physically weighs about as much as a hardback book of the same size. Amazon’s black leather case makes the Kindle 2 look like an ordinary day planner or a really thin Bible, which is unfortunate because after paying $400 for the stupid thing I was hoping people would notice me carrying it around and comment about how cool or trendy I looked. Even if the Kindle 2 in a case “looks” like a normal book, you certainly won’t treat it like one considering the unit’s cost. For example, normally while eating in a restaurant I would have no qualms about leaving a book or magazine sitting on the table if I had to leave for any reason. but the Kindle 2’s value will definitely prevent me from letting the thing out of my sight. In fact, the first day I took it with me out of the house I gripped it tightly with both hands whenever carrying it and made a soft palette out of my coat for it to ride on in the car …

Compared to the original model, the Kindle 2’s keyboard looks more thought out and less like “somebody threw up oddly shaped keys everywhere.” The side buttons for flipping pages have been redesigned so that they are not easily clicked accidentally, and the original’s somewhat odd “roller controller” has been replaced by a tiny joystick-like “nub” for navigation purposes. I had no complaints about the keyboard or buttons. To the right of the keyboard is a small, 5-way nub of a joystick that is used for navigation. Since pressing the joystick down serves as a “click”, I found myself nudging the joystick with the side of my thumb a lot.

The top of the unit contains a power slider and a headphone jack, the right hand side of the unit contains a volume rocker and the bottom contains a micro-USB connection which is awesome (not really; I’m being sarcastic) because every single other gadget I own from mp3s players to cameras uses “mini-USB”. I have at least five spare mini-USB cables in my laptop bag, and I don’t own anything that uses micro-USB (well, except for a Kindle 2 now). Fortunately the Kindle 2 comes with a cable that when attached to an adapter doubles as a wall-charger, but it’s too bad Amazon didn’t use the same port that’s on everything else I own. Apparently when they were picking which style of port to use, “the kind Rob already owns” never came up.

After spending a few minutes with a co-worker’s Kindle 1, it appears Amazon fixed all the original’s minor flaws and then some. Physically the device looks less like something someone cobbled together for a Star Trek set piece and much more like, well, something Apple would produce. The only step backwards in my opinion the removal of the unit’s SD slot. Kindle 2 owners are “limited” to the unit’s 2 gig of internal storage (1.4 gig usable) which, according to Amazon, translates to roughly 1,500 eBooks. I’ll explain why that would be a terrible idea in a moment.

The Kindle 2 ships with a “fold-out pamphlet” that walks you through the basics of charging your device, turning it on, and accessing to the owner’s manual which is, predictably, stored on the Kindle itself.

Acquiring Books

If you plan on reading books on the Kindle 2 (and not just carrying it around, trying to look hip) you’ll need to get them on there somehow. There are three main ways to get books onto a Kindle 2: you can buy them directly through Amazon’s Kindle store, you can e-mail them directly to your Kindle (converting them to “Kindle Format” in the process), or you can convert them on your PC and transfer them to the unit via USB.

Books on Amazon’s Kindle store seem to average $9.99, with some more and others less. To buy a book via Amazon’s store, owners simply visit the store via their Kindle and purchase the book. (Book previews, generally the first chapter, are available for free.) The book is magically transferred to your Kindle via its wireless Internet connection and your Amazon account is charged. This is the most hassle-free way to get books onto your Kindle. It’s also the most expensive.

If you already own books in one of the most common document formats (PDF, RTF, DOC, HTML, PRC, etc), you can e-mail them to your Kindle’s e-mail address. Amazon will convert the file to “Kindle-eese” for you, charge you a dime (seriously), and again shoot the book through the Internet to your Kindle. This is still relatively pain-free, although you’ll pay a dime for the convenience and Amazon’s conversion process on more complicated PDF layouts is iffy.

If you’re a cheap bastard like me and all you can think about is how you (a guy who doesn’t read books) just blew $400 on a thing that reads books, you can choose door number three, aka “the free option.” Using one of a small number of converts (Mobipocket.com’s free Mobipocket Creator software seems to be the most popular) you can convert those same types of documents for yourself and transfer them to the Kindle for free using the USB cable. There are lots of free places to download free books: Project Gutenberg has 20,000 free, classic books available, and ManyBooks.net boasts another 20,000+ books. Since last year I read about two books, those two sites alone should keep me busy for the next 20,000 years, well past World War 700.

Over the weekend, using Mobipocket Creator I converted a handful of books from varying formats to the Kindles to see how it worked. What I found was the less formatting the books originally had, the quicker they converted and the better they looked on the Kindle 2. Files in .TXT format did not need to be converted at all. The two Microsoft documents (one .DOC, one .RTF) converted in a matter of seconds and looked great on the Kindle. The HTML book I converted also converted quickly and looked fine on the Kindle. Then I converted three PDF files: one with no graphics, one with some graphics, and one with a ton of graphics featuring a two column layout. The first book converted almost perfectly and was very readable on the Kindle. The book with “some” graphics was only “sorta/kinda” screwed up. On the Kindle version the pictures often did not appear where they did in the original PDF. The third book, a 35 meg PDF, took almost ten minutes to convert and, when finished, look almost like the original except shrunken, with no way to enlarge the text or zoom in (imagine changing a book’s text from black to light gray and trying to read it from across the room).

By the end of my testing I had ten or twelve books stored on my Kindle and that’s when I discovered probably the unit’s biggest Achilles heel; neither the original nor the Kindle 2 support folders. There is no way to nest books in folders or organize your books by subject. There are three built-in methods of sorting: most-recent first (the default), Title, or Author. Note that any documents you convert/have converted, you’ll need to add title and author metadata information in manually. This is why you wouldn’t want to have 1,500 books stored on the Kindle 2.

And, not to look a free gift horse in the mouth, but I didn’t see any way to make a batch list for Mobipocket Creator, which means you’ll have to convert all of your books one at a time with it (or start playing with some of the command line tools available out there; once I get those mastered, I’ll most likely post again). As for conversions, the only real limitation seems to be how much work you are willing to do. I’m sure wonky PDF files could be dumped to Word and reformatted or massaged before converting … but again, it’s really all about how bad you want to do it.

Experimental Features

The Kindle 2 ships with three “experimental features”: an mp3 player, a web browser, and the Kindle 2’s new text-to-speech option.

In a world where basically every cell phone can play mp3s and entry-level mp3 players cost $10, I’m not sure what the need for this feature is. By the thirty seconds I played with it, I can tell you the Kindle 2’s mp3 player will play, in the order you added them, any mp3s you copy over to the Kindle. The mp3s play while you’re reading so if you’re the type of person who likes listening to music while you read and can’t afford a $10 mp3 player after buying a $400 eBook reader, the option is here and waiting for you. It’s not bad as much as it is limited and pointless. Theoretically the Kindle 2 could be used to listen to audiobooks too I suppose but, again, why?

The second experimental feature is the Kindle’s web browser, which is in black and white and works a lot like the browser on your phone, unless you have an iPhone in which case this one works not as good as the one on your phone. The Kindle does 600×800 resolution in sixteen shades of gray and doesn’t do Flash or anything fancy like that, so surfing for the sake of surfing isn’t a lot of fun. Amazon suggests browsing the mobile-friendly versions of sites, and sure enough the mobile-friendly versions of Wikipedia, Google and CNN all load relatively quickly and display properly on the Kindle. Gmail and other web-based mail programs worked okay, too. While the browser is no substitute for your PC’s, should you get thrown into a Turkish prison camp and manage to sneak your Kindle in, it’ll help pass the time.

The third experimental feature is the recently controversial “text-to-speech” feature, a feature that the Author’s Guild said was illegal and could possibly put audio book makers and performers out of business. I’m here to tell you folks, the only person you might confuse the Kindle’s voice with is Irona, Richie Rich’s robotic made (we would have also accepted Rosie, the maid from the Jetsons). The Kindle’s robotic voice sound just like the computer-generated voice built into my GPS, which is fine for audibly providing such information as “turn right”, but I wouldn’t want it to read a whole book to me. If the Kindle in encroaching on the rights of audiobook voice actors, you need new audiobook voice actors! In all fairness, the voice is pasable and if you like having books read to you, it’s not bad. However, it routnely gets inflections and pronunciations wrong. On page two or three of the Kindle’s manual the text-to-speech voice continually pronounced Whispernet (the Kindle’s wireless delivery service) as “whis-PERRN-it”. While having books read to you the Kindle keeps up by automatically flipping pages. Maybe people will use this feature while driving? I’m not sure.

Reading on the Kindle 2 vs. Real Books

The Kindle 2 has many advantages over real books. You can carry a lot of books on your person in a very small physical footprint. If there is a word you don’t know, you can select it with the joystick and the definition will show at the bottom of the screen (the Kindle 2 comes with the Oxford Dictionary built in). If you’re still confused, a button click can send the word to either Google or Wikipedia. With the text-to-speech feature you can have books read at you through the device’s slightly creepy robotic voice. For the price of a regular subscription, you can have several large newspapers delivered to your Kindle on a daily basis. (I checked the Chicago Tribune; you can get it delivered to your Kindle for $10/month, or you can get the real thing for $11.) You can also read tens of thousands of books for free, enough to keep you busy for a very long time. You can also purchase the latest books available on Amazon, regardless of where you physically are. You’re also saving trees, if you care about that.

Real books have the distinct advantage of not costing $400. They’re less dangerous to read in the bathtub, easier to loan to friends when you are done with them, and less likely to make you throw up if one gets lost or destroyed. Another advantage books have is basically every book is available in book format, where not every book is available in Kindle format. Also you can resell real books when you are done with them; there is no way currently to transfer or resell a Kindle book.

Frustrations …

My biggest frustration with the Kindle 2 at the moment is finding the features. There aren’t enough dedicated buttons on the unit to cover everything. That’s good from a design point of view, but in reality it means that most of the unit’s features are either (A) hidden in context-sensitive menus or (B) accessed through shortcuts that I will never remember. I suppose being the super nerd that I am I could make a list of all the shortcuts in .TXT format and copy it directly to the Kindle (note to self: put this on my to-do list) … but yeah, I’m never going to remember things like hitting Shift + SYM to toggle the text-to-speech reader.

Lots of shortcuts aren’t even listed in the manual. For example, I read on another blog that you can play Minesweeper (er, “Find the Mines”) on the Kindle. You can, but you have to know the shortcut (Alt+Shift+M from the Home Menu) — there’s nothing in the manual about it. Maybe that’s considered an Easter Egg, who knows. There’s also a picture viewer that will take a group of pictures and trick the Kindle into thinking they’re a book, but there’s no mention of that in the manual either (although everyone else in the blogosphere but me seems to know how to do it) and Alt+Shift+G takes a Kindle screenshot (again, undocumented). It’s frustrating not to have all the shortcuts, commands and menu choices available in one place without searching the web for them. (Note: after more searching on the blogosphere I guess a lot of these are undocumented because they are experimental in nature — still, it would be nice if the Kindle came with a one-sheet “cheat-sheet” of shortcuts that I could place directly on the device.)

Who is this thing for?

So, bottom line — who is this thing for? And more importantly, is it for you?

As far as eBooks go, what the Kindle gives me that I did not have was mobility. I read (occasionally) books on the computer screen, but that physically ties me to a computer. If you want to read PDFs, Word files or other eBooks on the go, the Kindle provides that platform. Its form factor is almost identical to that of a regular book, meaning reading eBooks while riding on a bus/train/plane, in the park, at lunch or lying in bed is a lot easier and inconspicuous on a Kindle than on a laptop.

The unit’s web capabilities may or may not enhance your reading experience. If you’re the type of person who looks up a lot of words or Googles things while reading, you may appreciate the unit’s lifetime (and free) web connectivity. To be honest, all I use the data plan on my phone for is looking up phone numbers and addresses while I’m out roaming, so I’ll shortly be canceling that $40/month plan, and in that aspect alone the Kindle will pay for itself in ten months.

The Kindle’s screen is very easy on the eyes, much easier than any LCD screen and essentially as comfortable as paper. The ability to adjust font sizes is nice, but the lack of any sort of light means that you can only read on the Kindle in the same lighting conditions where you could read a real book. Don’t get rid of your bedside lamp just yet, bookworms.

If you primarily buy paperback books (either new or used) and aren’t tied to the whole online/multimedia things the Kindle offers, this gadget may not be for you if, for no other reason than you will have to literally download and read hundreds of books to offset your initial investment cost.

One other demographic is the “I’m a geek and I want one because I think they’re cool.” Guilty as charged, yo. For what it’s worth I can tell you over the past two days I’ve started reading books that I’ve had on my hard drive for a year and never got around to looking at. If you’re a person like me who wants to read more and needs the incentive of a gadget (and the guilt associated with its price tag) to push you into doing it, the Kindle 2 might be exactly what you’re looking for.

One Week Follow Up

Over the past week I’ve read two books (Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have around the Home by Dave Barry, and The Essential Lenny Bruce by Lenny Bruce) and a couple of unpublished speeches by Bruce Sterling. All of these are files I’ve had on my computer for over a year and never read. The Kindle is indeed prompting me to read, for two reasons. One, the portability of the unit combined with the ability to read electronic files on the go is a perfect combination for me. I’ve had these PDF files sitting around on my hard drive, but never spent the time to sit in front of a computer and read them. And two, as I alluded to in the review, the guilt factor of the Kindle’s price is prompting me to use it. A lot. This week I read at the park while the kids were playing, I read in my chair while the family was watching television, and I read in the car while Susan went inside the mall to run an errand.

And like I suspected, that $400 price tag I keep referring to makes me (the owner) very cognizant of the device’s whereabouts. I have been reluctant to toss it on the bar at home (next to the sink) where I put my wallet and keys after work. When Morgan wanted a push while swinging at the park, I was very hesitant about lying the device down on the ground. I have found that I’m even careful when passing the device from one hand to the other, worried that I’ll drop the thing and smash it’s little Etch-a-Sketch screen to bits. I was also concerned about leaving the device in my car while running into a convenient store. Sure, Kindles aren’t that common yet, but once people figure out what they are I could see people smashing in a car window just to grab one and run (people already do that for GPS units, so this isn’t that far-fetched).

As I suspected I haven’t used the mp3 player at all and I only use the text-to-speech option right after telling someone, “Hey, check out this thing’s text-to-speech option!” (although in my defense, I have a road trip coming up next week and may see how it works in the car).

So far I have been very pleased with the Kindle 2 and it’s currently getting a lot of use. I’ll let you know in six-months or so whether or not it’s still being used or if it’s up for sale.