What About the Kindle?

This blog has been dormant for a while, but I may post from time to time as book-related thoughts occur to me.  I'm also going to migrate my reading list over here from my main blog A Year With Horses, but I haven't completed that yet.

I've had an Amazon Kindle (the simpler wifi version) for about three months now - my husband has one too.  After using it a lot over that time period, I've got reasons to like and dislike it.  On balance, I've found it very useful, but with qualifications, and it only works for certain types of books and reading.

Likes:

It is extremely portable.  If you read a lot, as I do, and travel or commute, it's a life saver.  I used to travel with large numbers of books - very difficult when you're not traveling by car.  Now I can just load up the Kindle before I go, and also know that if I run out all I have to do is find a network to use to download more books.  It's also small enough to fit in a coat pocket, or purse, or briefcase, without hardly a bulge.

It's easy to use, and the battery power lasts a very long time (if you keep the wifi turned off).  It's a nice size to hold easily, the ink technology eliminates glare (which means it works just fine outdoors unlike a computer screen), and the basic features and arrangement of the menus are very good.

Having a choice of two built-in dictionaries is lovely.

I can buy books quickly, as quickly as I decide I want them, almost within seconds.  I think this is good news for publishers who are worried about lost revenue from e-books.  I believe I'm actually spending more on books now than I used to, because I'm buying more, even though the price per unit is (usually) less.  A fairly high percentage of the books I want to read are available on the Kindle.

My husband and I can read the same books if we choose, for the price of one book, and even at the same time.

The preview function, where you can download part of a book to try it out before you buy it, is very useful.

Not buying all those books means less to clutter up the house or have to be disposed of.

The ability to make the type size larger is very nice.

Dislikes:

I can buy books quickly, as quickly as I decide I want them.  This means, as noted above, that I'm probably spending more and more likely to just buy a book on impulse.  There's never that delicious sense of anticipation - but maybe it's just that I have no self-control!

I go to the library less often.  I love libraries, always have since I was a child.  There's something about the serendipity of finding a book just because it's near another book, and browsing the new books is especially delightful - all sorts of fun things to discover.  You can't do that on a Kindle - you have to know what you want to buy.  I also think that libraries are an important social and educational institution that needs to be maintained and enhanced, and I worry that, as physical books decline in importance, libraries will too.

A number of the books I'd like to buy on the Kindle are not available for it.  Editions of translated or older books may not be the best ones available - sometimes they've been poorly scanned or the translations aren't good.

The formatting on some books is poor - line breaks that show up as hyphens in the middle of words, dropped text, etc.

It turns books into consumables.  For books that are consumables - light fiction or other stuff you don't want to keep around - that's fine, but for books you might want to refer back to or keep, the Kindle isn't very good.

It's not good for looking things up in, or wanting to go back over things or find places to reread.  Paging back and forth is awkward, and looking from an index (these can be pretty useless as the Kindle uses "locations" instead of page numbers) to the book, or wanting to flip back and forth between one place and another in the same book, is at best awkward and at worst impossible.  There is a way to "bookmark", but that's not the same.

Although it's comfortable to hold and easy to use, it's really ugly.  There must be some way for electronics makers to move away from the ugly industrial, filing-cabinet gray.  Yuck!  There are some ugly book covers too, but also lots of really nice ones that actually are decorative when you're done reading them.  Also, I really miss the feel and design elements of a nice book - the different fonts and layout decisions, the nice paper and the covers (at least when they're attractive) - the "bookness".

It's no good for books with color illustrations.  Some people seem to find the iPad good for that, but I can't imagine how a fine art book, with high-quality photographs, would show on an iPad - not well would be my guess.

The annotation function is hard to use - the keyboard is small and awkward.  I'm also personally not a fan of the "shared annotation" function, where you can see what others have annotated and your annotations are part of the pool.  To me it seems a bit creepy, and knowing what's "popularly" annotated doesn't really interest me.

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So, in summary, I like and don't like the Kindle, and my book choices are beginning to sort themselves into Kindle and non-Kindle books.  A book that I'm going to want to keep, refer to more than once, or where color or the need to move around in the book is essential, I'll buy the physical copy.  Most fiction and any other book that I'm just going to consume, I'll buy on the Kindle.