Kindle Review – Updated

I recently finished my first book on my shiny new Kindle DX.  (The book was Chronicles, Vol. I by Bob Dylan — it probably merits its own review if I can find the time.)  How does the DX measure up to its dead tree counterparts?  Quite well.  It is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a traditional book — if, and it is a big if — you are reading the book cover-to-cover.  So the Kindle works well for a novel or piece of nonfiction that you read from page one straight through.  However, the Kindle seems less useful for reference books, or any type of work that you might want to skim-and-scan — the searching and linking features are just a bit clunky.  This is not an insurmountable problem and I am sure it will be solved as the device evolves.

If you haven’t had you hands on a Kindle, let me just say that the display is jaw-dropping.  When I showed it around many of my friends and colleagues could hardly believe they were looking at an electronic display.  The text and images are crystal clear.  This makes reading with the Kindle very easy on the eyes — no eyestrain or headaches like you might have with reading a lot of text on backlit LCD devices (I’m looking in your direction, iPhone).  The larger form-factor of the DX is also nice — the smaller Kindle is a little dinky in my opinion.

Another minor flaw is the noticeable 1/8 second hiccup as you turn the page in a document.  This is a little distracting, especially if you have your hands  on a real page-turner (like Dylan’s book, by the way).  Again, this is something that seems like it could be improved in future releases.

I also should also point out that the native PDF support is hit-or-miss.  Since PDF is a page layout standard, the Kindle does not give you any way to reformat the document (font size, paging and so on).  So  some PDFs look great, and others are completely unreadable.  This is disappointing because I envisioned myself downloading a lot of technical documentation which is freely available in PDF.  Some of those sources look fine, but it depends on how the original document is formatted.  However, my primary intention with PDF is to convert plain text documents  (such as Gutenberg texts) into PDF .  This works just fine and gives me a virtually unlimited source of free literature.

So the Kindle is great for most books, but I cannot say the same for newspapers.  Again the problem is in how I am used to reading the paper:  I scan, find an article,  read it, scan some more, skim an article, read part of an article, abandon an uninteresting article, scan and skim some more, and so on.  The Kindle just doesn’t support this style of reading.  I suppose I need to keep at it.  I have about a year’s worth of free 2-week trial subscriptions to get accustomed to it.