Brief thoughts after my first few hours of a Kindle 3. I bought the 3G+WiFi one.
Things I Like
- The e-ink thing. It really is very good. I wear glasses, and now in my 40-somethings I actually have reading glasses too. So I was sceptical that it would be as good as paper for me. But it is. In fact, it might even be better. I'm still using the default font size, and even dropped it down a size at one point. But the option to increase the font size is a serious non-gimmick I think.
- The ability to download a sample of a book for free, before buying. A friend told me this was cool, but I was worried it would just tempt me to flit from sample to sample. Well, not really enough time to assess that properly yet, but so far it has been good. Last nght I downloaded the sample of "Where Good Ideas Come From" and then promptly romped through it over breakfast. Converting that into the paid full version was as simple as saying, "aye, go on then".
- Reading in bed. This had two components. First, light. This is not really a feature of the kindle itself (although the e-ink may be helping, but rather of the Amazon case I bought with it. It has an in-built, Kindle-powered LED, that is bright enough to read by (even given my eyesight), but not so bright as to disturb my wife. The second thing was also something my friend alerted me to. Since you have only a single page to look at, you could find a good reading position (e.g. lying on right side, or lying on left side), and then you're. There's no need to switch positions every time you go from the left page to the right. And it's true!
- Just plain reading. Perhaps the best test of the thing is, can I stop noticing it's there and just get on with reading. Yes. No problem.
Things I'm Still Wondering About
- I've realized that with a physical book, now that it's absent, that I get some kind of useful positional information from how many pages are in the "already read" portion, and how many are in the "still to be read" portion. The Kindle is giving some feedback on that, but I'm not used to that yet
- Reading in the bath. I followed what I'd heard the Amazon CEO does, and shoved my Kindle, cover an' all, into a 1 gallon ziplock bag. I folded the cover back on itself although it may have been possible to make it fit open. It actually worked fine. Obviously it does nothing to help the look of that cool e-ink display; and the occasional ripple I got from the ziplock plastic as I tried to flatten it was vaguely annoying. But honestly, it was fine. Most of the time I forgot about bag and Kindle and just read.
Things I Don't Like
- DRM. To allow a comparison of reading experience, the first Kindle book I bought was one I already had in paper form. And I admit it annoys me. After all, exactly what did I buy when I bought the paper book? Was it, as many "IP" fans would have me believe just a license to use the content? In that case, why did I have to pay again for the material-less Kindle version. And in playing with the text-to-speech function, I noticed that whether or not a spoken version was available was partly down to whether the "rights holder" had permitted it. I confess I haven't fully worked out my own views on IP within a more general theory of property. So I allow for the fact that it may not simply be a lame excuse to pull a gun on someone to get their money. But it's annoying all the same. (Clearly not anoying enough, though, to stop me buying the bloomin' thing.)
- That light thing -- the one that I said I liked. Well as I said, it's not really part of the Kindle. Since I'm guessing almost everyone who buys a Kindle is going to want to buy a case too, then don't think of the price as being around $190. Instead, think $250-ish.
More as I find it.
P.S. On price. These days, manufacturing quality just seems to be crap. The number of things -- electronic, houehold, etc -- that just break after far too short a time seems to be increasing. So while in the past I never bought shop warranties for anything, now I'm starting to do that more and more. So to the $190 for the Kindle, and $50-ish for the case, I added another $50-ish for Best Buy's "Oops I Dropped It" (as the sales lassie called it) warranty. So, total cost to me for the Kindle 3 3G+WiFi, with what I consider recommended, if not essential, add-ons was $324.72 (including TX sales tax).