Kindle: First Impressions

Posted: March 21st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Computers, Opinions (Uninformed) | 2 Comments »

I decided to buy a Kindle last week, for a few reasons. I really wanted to start getting into e-books; they’re cheaper than hardcover for new releases now, I don’t have to wait for them to get delivered and they don’t take up space. Although I probably would have preferred an iPad if money were no object, I’m not really willing to spend $500 on a tablet when I already have a laptop.

I bought the WiFi-only model (didn’t really see myself needing the 3G version) and have been fiddling around with it for a couple of days now. My first impressions are pretty favorable.

I’m really surprised at how fast the e-ink display refreshes. I’d played around with an earlier-generation Kindle and a Sony e-book reader for all of about a minute years ago, and was really turned off by the refresh speed on the display. No such problems with the latest-gen Kindle, at least when it comes to reading and menu navigation; there are times when I find myself getting ahead of it, but most of that is off of my typical operating path.

The Amazon marketing hype on the display isn’t too far off; it really does look a lot like paper and is pretty easy to read without a light on (although I’m trying to save my eyes by not reading in dim light these days). I haven’t tried it in direct sunlight yet.

The quality of e-books on the Kindle varies depending on what you’re reading. Some publishers didn’t really put a lot of effort annotating things like chapters in their books, which makes navigation a challenge; Kindle’s navigation works by jumping to “locations” rather than pages, so you often have to search for the location corresponding to a page rather than the page itself if you don’t have a bookmark handy. I’ve only had this problem for the freebies on the Kindle store; the books I’ve actually paid for have pretty well-groomed metadata.

The fact that the Kindle doesn’t support the EPUB standard and instead uses its own DRMed format is irritating, certainly, but I feel like I can live with it, especially since converting EPUB to their proprietary format is supposed to be fairly straightforward. I’m pretty confident that eventually they’ll do the same thing the iTunes Music Store did and drop DRM entirely, or at least support EPUB natively with a software update.

I’m pretty happy with the Kindle so far. Does anyone else out there have one of these things? Any tips and tricks I should know about?

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2 Comments on “Kindle: First Impressions”

  1. 1 Streeter said at 10:43 am on March 21st, 2011:

    A couple things.

    Instapaper has an awesome service where it will send kindle ebooks once a day or once a week of your recently unread instapaper sites to read. Free and super awesome when paired with the Instapaper read it later bookmarklet.

    This wasn’t obvious to me at first, but when reading, the marker on the bottom shows where you started reading this session and where you currently are. So you can see how much you’ve read since you started on your current book in the current session.

    calibre is a great organizer for books on your hard drive. And it can convert epub to mobi.

    Lendle.me and Book Lending both exist to facilitate borrowing books from other Amazon users using Amazon’s 2 week book lending service. Not all books are supported, and not all books are on the site. But works great when it works.

  2. 2 Alex said at 9:06 pm on March 22nd, 2011:

    Awesome, thanks so much for sharing this!