Initial Ponderings on Amazon’s Kindle ereader.

For Christmas my client purchased an Amazon Kindle ereader for me. There was a bit of a conspiracy to keep this purchase a secret from me that involved the enlistment of the Woman I Love and my own mother. Needless to say, I was in the dark until Christmas Day when I opened the box to find it sitting there staring at me.

It is a strange thing, this relationship I have with John. Previously we traveled to New York City to meet him in person and do research for After America. New York City had not been high on my list of places to travel to but it meshed up with my schedule better than San Francisco did and since it was February, how could any warm blooded male resist the urge to give the Big Apple to the Woman they Love?

Turns out that New York City took most of my Midwestern notions and flushed them down the toilet. A friendly city, active, exciting and far different from the usual, mean spirited impression we are left with.

Staring at the Kindle, I wondered if I wasn’t on the verge of a similar eye opening experience. I was at best lukewarm to it. Reading off a computer screen has never been a favorite chore of mine. I tend to prefer passages shorter than 2000 words and I find I do not process the information in the same manner as text printed on paper.

So I charged the device, registered it and started to noodle around with it. No, like most men, I didn’t read the instructions. You don’t really need to. The Kindle seems to be an intuitive device for the most part, easily sorted out. It helps that we have wifi in the apartment now so I was able to purchase a couple of books for a test run.

For the record, I picked up Polybius and I picked up Thomas Fleming’s work on the intimate life of our Founding Fathers. Much of what I have read out of Fleming so far is material I was already aware of.

Truth to tell, however, I have not spent much time reading on it until this morning. I was in the mood for a newspaper while Trinity watched the new reality show Toddlers and Tiaras (who comes up with this crap?) and there was the Kindle on my desk.

“I’ll just download a paper,” I thought.

Yeah, but which one? There are a hundred and fifty plus available. I decided to go with something simple and started off with USA Today, the e copy of which is a quarter cheaper. The Kindle downloaded it in less than a second and I was off.

Couldn’t I read the USA Today on my laptop? Yeah, umm, it seems the laptop’s multimedia capability is a bit of a distraction. It is too easy to go check facebook or some such.

The screen on the kindle is just about the right size for reading. You can adjust the text size and at first I had it set for a larger size before I found I was toggling the page buttons too often. I settled for something closer to default, which gives me a block of text I can concentrate on for a few seconds before moving on. The page turn is not instantaneous so if you are impatient, you’ll need to clamp down on that. If you’ve been spoiled with touch screens on the iPod Touch, iPhone and the iPad, you are going to have to wait as well.

The screen is not backlit so you can read it in daylight. On the other hand, if you want to read it in a darkroom, you need to turn on a light.

My only real issues with the Kindle so far have to do with overall design as opposed to function. When I hold it in my hand, it feels a bit too slim. Part of this is due to the fact that my hands are shaped oddly and nothing ever really fits them right. I like the item I am reading to seat itself in the palm of my hand, right where the meat of the thumb meets your life line. The other issue is that the page tabs seem a bit too small.

Do I love the Kindle? I think the jury is still out on that. I definitely like my Kindle. I like the fact that I can carry a library of books with me in the palm of my hand and that I can access those books at will. I’ve lost track of the number of times I have loaded up bags full of books to use for research while out of the apartment. The Kindle solves that problem for me. I can see it serving as a useful research device in the future.

The Kindle can also be used to store documents of your own in PDF format. I had given some thought to purchasing a Kindle DX for use in my classes for lecture notes. This would get me away from the massive three ring binders I am in the habit of carrying around. I’m not sure I’ll be using this Kindle for that purpose. I may put my notes on there so I can review them prior to giving a lecture. However, more and more, I find that I lecture without any notes at all.

I know that I definitely enjoy reading on it far more than I do my iPod Touch. The Touch can be used for very short items and I think the finger flick method of moving the text around is better than the tabs. That said, the Touch screen is far too small for lengthy reading. I still can not figure out how folks read books through their cellphones. My eyes ache at the prospect.

Will this thing do away with print books? Hard to say, really.

I’ll have more thoughts on the Kindle reading as time progresses. In the meantime, a hearty and public thank you to John Birmingham for the Christmas present.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri