Kindle 3 – a game changer

Well, here I am, two days into Kindle ownership and I'm sold. There is a little bit of clunkiness but, overall, this is the best evidence yet that paper is dead. Actually, and more worrisome as some of my friends work in book publishing/distribution, I can forecast that we will have no need for traditional publishers and bookshops in 5-10 years… So, what is it? It's a device that is roughly a third the size of an iPad (which my wife owns) that is designed for nothing more than displaying books and documents. The most striking aspect is the e-ink display that really (and, I mean, really!) looks like paper. The first time I was amazed by this was when I opened the box and saw my shiney (well, actually, matt…) Kindle with yer standard plastic sticky cover with instructions to plug it in and charge it. If you've bought an LCD monitor in the last five years, you'll be used to that bit of see-through plastic with white lettering on it… Then I realised that the see-through plastic was actually see-through; the text was on the Kindkle screen! Honestly, writing this doesn't do it justice – to see the Kindle e-ink screen looking like, well, slightly grayish paper is pretty amazing. Actually, to digress slightly, my wife "doesn't like it". "Why?" I ask… "because it just looks… weird… I prefer my iPad…" This is, I suspect, a common reaction. We've all grown use to our reflective OLED and LED driven iPhones, iPads and HTC Touches that the Kindle seems like a retrograde step. But, wait… you want to read a book? Well, step into the Kindle's magic kingdom. As a replacement for the paperback it is perfect. The screen mimics a (slightly gray)  paperback book and you soon lose yourself in the words and are no longer distracted by the medium. Rewind a little; have you tried to read a book on an iPhone or a Touch? Too glarey (is that a word?) and totally unusable outside if the sun is even hinting at shining. The Kindle is so like paper, and so unlike our traditional view of mobile devices, that I actually surprised myself by walking down a dark corridor and going "woah – I can't read – it's too dark" and had to mentally reset myself to the fact that I couldn't read a real paperback in the dark… OK, so back to the reading experience. I now have a variety of books, magazines and self-transmitted documents (more later) on it and I must admit that, barring a few teething problems, I'm already treating this as I would its paper equivalent (with a slight more respectful regard for water and other Kindle-averse situations). The Kindle allows you to set the text size, spacing and orientation and I have found myself configuring the smallest text and smallest line-spacing to get the "closest" to a single page on the display (I'm slightly myopic so tiny text works for me). Then I downloaded a PDF of a Manning Publishers book (Silverlight 4 in Action, excellent!) and realised that you don't have the same control over a PDF as you do over an e-book. The text was just too tiny (trying to display a ~10" book in a ~6" space) and so flipping to landscape mode was a great compromise, allowing me to have the (Kindle) book beside me while I hack away at the computer.

As for reading "normal" books, the experience is a dream. After, literally, a few minutes, you forget that you're reading this on a piece of plastic. The size, the weight, and the whole experience is as if you are reading a paperback. If I had a complaint is that I'd like to turn off the left hand side or right hand side page-turn buttons. Sometimes, you're holding it woth your left hand and use your right to change pages over on the right hand side. It can be too easy to inadvertently flick pages with the hand you hold the unit on. Granted, this is a bit of a UI disaster as I tend to flip the unit from hand to hand so, I don't know exactly how to resolve this, but it is a pain in the ass.

What to read? The base unit allows you to surf the Amazon.{insert-home-country-here} store free of charge, either over wifi or the built in 3G modem. This allows you to buy an almost unlimited (well, ~600,000 in the UK) number of books as well as downloading a huge amount of (mostly historic) books, free of charge. The pricing model seems, to my mind, pretty good. I note that my fave author's latest (Lee Childs) book is available for download at £8.54, compared to £9.49 for a hardcover edition.

At this stage in the books life, I'd probably buy the one made of dead trees… However, if you look at his previous books, you'd find "61 Hours" (2009) for £3.59 (paperback £3.99) or an older book, Tripwire (2000) for £2.76 (paperback £4.15).

So, the moral of the tale is that if you want the latest and greatest, then they have you by the short and curlies but, if you're willing to wait a few months or (ideally!) discover a great author who's been in print for years, then there are bargains to be had.

What about your own content, or stuff that other people send you? When you first configure your Kindle (and it's set up, out-of-the-box with your Amazon username and email address) then you get two @kindle.com email addresses. The first is the "send me anything! I have gold Amex and don't mind if you send me 893MB advertorials as a PDF" and the second is a slightly more sensible me@free.kindle.com address that only kicks in when you are connected over USB or wifi.

Let's take the first, err, first. So, if I register me@kindle.com (I suspect someone beat me to it) then I, you, or anyone can email a PDF or "similar" document. The current list is;

• Microsoft Word (.DOC)
• Structured HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
• RTF (.RTF)
• JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
• GIF (.GIF)
• PNG (.PNG)
• BMP (.BMP)
• PDF (.PDF): Look below for details.
• Microsoft Word (.DOCX) is supported in our experimental category.

BTW, I sent a quite complex .docx document and it displayed perfectly!

The slight problem with this is that Amazon charge you for each document that you receive, currently at the rate of $0.99 per Megabyte.

Imagine someone who hates you sending you the complete Cantonese transcription of War And Peace, every 5 minutes…!

Luckily, there are a couple of safeguards… Firstly (and most draconically) you can define a list of people who you are willing to accept files from. Slightly more useful is the option to set a "maximum download charge". I set mine to £0.00

So, where do the docs go, if you're not on the list or the charge is going to be too high? They are simply redirected to your me@free.kindle.com address where they will be automatically downloaded the next time you are on wifi, or you can transfer them via USB (because a copy is also sent to your Amazon registered email address).

Other than the above-noted issue where PDFs can be tricky to format on the Kindle, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was, and how well they displayed.

Downsides

Well, the buttons being ultra-sensitive would be one. I also didn't really touch on the webkit-based web browser which is ok-ish (and definitely better than I could do with a trackpad based interface) but it's a bit clunky.

I'd like the portrait / landscape setting to be book-specific, rather than system wide. Not sure I trust the "30 days battery limit". Had it for 2 days and it's showing ~75% full, however wifi is permanently enabled, which the manual suggests downgrades the battery life to around 10 days.

Shame there's not (currently) any colour.

Overall

This is amazing. It's not colo(u)r, it's not touch-senstitive, it doesn't have a proximity or orientation sensor. But it displays books in a way that we haven't seen since, well, the advent of paper. The ease of browsing for books, magazines and papers (a topic I didn't cover today) within the device is unsurpassed. I real-life compared this to the iPad and I much (well, "much, much, much") preferred the Kindle. The iPad is bigger and more colourful, but the Kindle is easier to read which is, to be totally honest, the whole point.

When you look at the entire infrastructure that Amazon has provided, from easy (free) publishing, to the distribution system, to an incredibly usable hardware device, it's easy to predict the death of the hardback, the paperback, publishers and bookshops. I'll mourn some of them…