Over the last several days I’ve talked about the publishing environment that the Kindle was introduced into, about the technologies that make it possible, and its physical design.  Today we get to the thing most people really care about: Is it nice to read with, or does it suck?  And how hard is it to load up with books?

There are two really common complaints about the Kindle that come from people who haven’t actually used them.  They don’t think they’ll like reading text on a display, and they don’t think that curling up with a gadget is aesthetically as pleasing as a paper book.

They may have a point about aesthetics but there is give and take here.  On the one hand you don’t have a paper-and-ink smell with the Kindle, although if you’ve ever read a slightly mildewy book you might consider the lack of smell to be a big advantage.  On the other the leather cover gives a smell similar to a nice leather-bound book, the kind that you can’t really buy anymore.  So while it gives up a little by not using paper, it turns every book—even that trashy romance novel—into a leather-bound copy.  Whether or not this trade-off is a net win is a personal decision, but I expect that as e-books take off we will see a market for high-quality readers, perhaps made with polished oak and leather rather than plastic.  We already have Sony’s modernist metal design which many find appealing; I think the sky is the limit when it comes to e-book reader design possibilities.

Previously I talked about using the leather cover as a way of making the Kindle easier to handle without pushing the buttons that cover most of its edges, and there is actually an aesthetic issue here as well.  Amazon recommends that you read the Kindle in its cover, with the flap of the cover folded back.  This does more than make it somewhat easier to handle, it also evokes the feeling of holding a book or magazine by the spine with the pages folded around in back.  As soon as you try this you start to see the brilliance of the Kindle’s design: the “next page” button is right there where your thumb falls.  This is very natural.

With this grip the unusual beveled edge on the right makes sense, too.  It has the approximate feel of the edges of the pages of an open book.  We’re accustomed to turning pages in a book by holding that edge and bending, causing the next page to separate and be easy to turn.  On the Kindle almost the whole right edge is the “next page” button, making page turning feel surprisingly similar to paper.

You don’t notice it right away, but over time it becomes obvious that someone spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the Kindle feel a lot like a paper book.  This is in stark contrast to the design of all of the other e-book readers I’ve ever seen and used, which are all very computeresque.

Now that I’ve mentioned aesthetics, it’s time to talk about reading on that screen.  Just about everyone these days is accustomed to LCD and CRT displays, and many people think that reading e-books means reading on that type of display.  Luckily technology has come to save us from such a horrible fate.

If you haven’t seen an electronic paper display yet you need to find one to take a look at.  Reading on electronic paper is nothing like reading on an LCD!  The experience is very similar to paper.  The background is a light gray, like recycled paper, and the “printed” text looks a lot like newsprint.  Everyone who has seen my Kindle remarks on how nice the display looks.  It’s clean, it’s very sharp, and it looks good at any angle.  The display is slightly glossy, like magazine pages, so you sometimes have to angle the Kindle slightly to avoid glare—just like with a magazine.  It doesn’t feel like you’re reading on a computer screen at all.  I can read all day without eyestrain.  Double-plus good!

Another big win for the Kindle (and e-books in general) is the malleability of text.  If you buy a book it is printed in the size and font that you bought.  If you don’t like it, or if you grow older and find you can’t read small type anymore your only possible choice in this matter is to buy another book printed differently.  While there is a growing market for large-type books you’ll soon find that most books are only ever printed in one style.  E-books improve on this dramatically.  Any book can be “printed” in any font the device supports, and can be enlarged or shrunk within the limits of the font.  Unfortunately Amazon makes only partial use of this capability.

The Kindle has two fonts, but only one of them is used for reading books.  Their choice of font was excellent, it’s a very clean and clear font, but if your book needs multiple typefaces (a fairly common practice) then the Kindle version of the book loses something versus the printed book.  I expect that we’ll see expanded font availability as the Kindle matures but it is surprising that they didn’t offer at least two or three.

But when it comes to resizing text the Kindle hits a home run.  It offers six print sizes—three more than either my Palm or the Sony reader.  When using the Palm I almost never changed font sizes because the small font was nigh unreadable and the large font used up so much of the page per word that turning pages became a constant chore.  With its large display and clear fonts I am much more willing to change the size of text on the Kindle, and Amazon even put a “change the text size” button (AA) right on the keyboard to make it very easy (no burrowing through menus).  If I am getting tired I just boost the size a notch or two, reducing fatigue and eyestrain.  Once, after my eyes were dilated during an exam, I was able to use the largest size to allow me to continue to read.  In previous years I had to be bored for the several hours it took for the medicine to wear off.  I like this feature a lot!

While the electronic ink display does a terrific job of displaying text it is limited to only four shades of gray.  (Sony’s Reader offers eight.) This severely limits its ability to display photographs, which appear more like they’ve been run through a photocopier than a product of a print process.  Many newspapers have pictures, and you can usually more-or-less make out what the picture is about, but it’s certainly not clear.  Full-color electronic ink displays are expected next year, which should allow future e-books to do a better job with pictures, but for now it’s a significant limitation.

A cute but very useful feature is the ability to place bookmarks.  By scrolling the LCD indicator up to the top corner of the page and clicking it the page is marked with a dog-ear (or unmarked if there was a bookmark there already).  It’s quick and it’s easy and I use it a lot.  You can set several bookmarks and use the “Go To Bookmark” option on the page menu to jump between them.

One of the advantages often espoused for digital books is the ability to link between text.  The Kindle uses that for linking within a document.  Pick a line in the table of contents of a book and click on it and you’ll jump to the appropriate chapter, for instance.  Pick the teaser paragraph on a newspaper article to read the entire article.  It’s simple and it works.  Unfortunately there does not appear to be support for following links to outside sources.  The obvious feature here would be to click on a URL and bring up the Kindle’s (simple) web browser, but as far as I can tell you can’t do that.  There’s nothing stopping them from adding it in the future but it is a possibility as yet unrealized.

On the flip side people complain that you can’t highlight an e-book, or add notes to it.  The Kindle supports both, albeit in a primitive manner.

You can only highlight whole lines in a block, and only on one page at a time.  To do this you move the LCD selector to the first line you want to highlight and click.  A menu is displayed giving you three options: Lookup, Highlight, and Add Note.  Select Highlight and it draws a bar above the line of text you clicked.  Click again at another line and the text appears in a box.  Clicking on a highlighted selection allows you to remove the highlight.  I think Amazon could have done a better display than just a black box around the text, but it’s possible that shading would have been too hard to read so perhaps they did the best they could.  It will take a color display to really take advantage of this feature.

As you probably guessed you select “Add Note” to add annotations to the text.  When you do this a little notepad icon appears on the right edge of the page next to the line of text you selected.  This works reasonably well except that the note editor is, well, pretty lousy.

Because the electronic ink display takes almost a second to update there is a big lag between typing and display.  This is not too bad, you probably aren’t looking at the text all the time anyway as you try to hit the tiny keys on the keyboard, but editing that text is a nightmare.  You can move the cursor forward and backward within a note using ALT-H and ALT-J, which is a little annoying but not too bad, but there is no way to move up or down a line at a time, or to the beginning or end of a line.  If you want to go make a change somewhere in the middle of the text you have to move the cursor one character at a time all the way to the word you want to edit, and with the almost-a-second refresh time of the display it severely tests your patience.  That’s horrible, so bad that I have made very little use of the annotation feature in the four months I’ve had the Kindle.  This needs improvement.

Speaking of moving cursors, this brings up one of the possible enhancements that could be made to future versions of the Kindle: A touch screen.  Such a screen would make for easy cursor location and more precise highlighting, even if they didn’t support free-form drawing.  The iLiad e-book reader already does this and it’s a very nice feature.  I’m told that the downside is that it would add depth to the display, thereby interfering with it, but it might be a good trade-off in a lot of cases.

The last of the line-selection features is “Lookup.” The Kindle ships with the New Oxford American Dictionary, and it’s linked to the “Lookup” button (as well as the big “Search” button on the keyboard).  When you select “Lookup” it finds every word on the line, except simple words like conjunctions, and presents you with a brief definition of each of them.  If you then click on one of the definitions you get everything—pronunciation, definition, alternative definitions, and even etymology.  This is a huge improvement over paper and I use it very frequently.  My seven-year-old daughter loves it even more than I do.

That covers most most of the experience of reading a book on the Kindle.  Taken as a whole I find that it is surprisingly close to a “real” book, but it does not yet meet its potential when it comes to marking up a text.  I’m out of time for today, but tomorrow I will wrap up with the book-buying (and downloading) experience as well as visit some of the other features of the Kindle in Shopping For Kindle Books.



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