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Reading the New York Times On a Kindle 2
reifman links to his thorough and thoughtful review of the experience of reading a newspaper on the Kindle 2. "I've been eager to try The New York Times on the Kindle 2; here's my review with a basic video walk-through and screenshots. I give the Kindle 2 version of The Times a B. Software updates could bring it up to an A-. Kindle designers should have learned more from the iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, my Kindle display scratched less than 24 hours after it arrived. As I detail in the review, Amazon customer service was not very accommodating. Is it my fault — or will Kindle 2 evolve into an Apple 1G Nano-like $22.5M settlement? You can read about Hearst's e-reader for newspapers from earlier today on Slashdot."
A friend of mine bought one for reading in the subway. He finds it great, and he points out correctly that for avid readers it's wonderful just from the standpoint of space conservation. For Manhattan-dwellers especially, that's a major selling point.
It's a pretty good product--the only bad thing about it is from the publisher's standpoint, since IIRC it requires you to prepare your books in a new format (which is a not-insignificant undertaking) and Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)
Countering that is that it will make some books more accessible. It doesn't take much work to get books now, but the ability to have them in front of you and easily readable right away combined with sample chapters gives you at least part of the convenience of actually walking into a bookstore, only you get it anyplace you can get the data connection.
I can't speak to the durability, though, because it's still a new toy. Give it a year and see how it holds up in different conditions. But overall, this is definitely a shiny product, in the good sense as opposed to the coefficient-of-specular-reflection-is-too-high sense. It'll probably really help Amazon once the economy picks back up, since more people will have the income to spend on a Kindle and they'll have had a chance to improve it.
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
Will you hand me the sports section to read while you browse the NYT magazine?
Hey, where's the crossword?
Seriously? Every time with this shit?
Let me summarize the obvious: reflective display, not an LCD, ie you can actually read on it; first more-or-less practical generation of a new technology, as with everything else in the entire history of all technology, price will come down as it becomes more popular.
What is so fiendishly difficult to grasp?
sic transit gloria mundi
and... you can't read text on an LCD?
LOL. Allow me to chime in with the OP for folks like you that refuse to get it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning. You can also rub lemon juice on paper cuts to keep them from getting infected, but the majority of us choose not to.
The point is that e-ink is easier on the eyes, which makes what you're reading ... wait for it ... easier to read.
In Jeff Bezos' interview on The Charlie Rose show, he used a flashlight analogy, saying thta reading on a convential screen is like staring into a flashlight. The light may not be as bright as a typical flashlight, but it's a helluva lot brighter (and different) than the light reflected off a piece of paper. Or a Kindle. Ergo, Bezos opted not to use a LCD screen, while being aware of the tradeoffs of doing so. The reaction to his decision has ranged from praise to amazement to a shitload of Kindles being sold.
Um, they do allow Authors to give their content away. I downloaded a free e-book from Amazon over the weekend.
The sheer amount of ignorance on this forum has been STAGGERING. What the hell is wrong with you people?
And if you look up the Kindle Wikipedia page, they list off a dozen stores that sell and give away books that are readable on the Kindle.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
-in case the Kindle should be lost/broken or I buy a newer model, then all books are lost, too?
No, book purchases are tied to your Amazon.com account, not to the device. You can redownload any of them on a new device. This includes books that get pulled from the Amazon.com store after the date of purchase! (I have a Kindle, I tested this)
- in case I switch to a different brand of ebook reader, I'm stuck with a load of unreadable books?
Yes. Hopefully Amazon will switch to the ePub format for more openness soon.
- I cannot loan a book to a friend, except by giving him the whole device?
Yep, although you can share with family who have a second or third device on the same account.
- I cannot try to remove the DRM, otherwise Amazon will kill my service?
That's pretty standard, isn't it? However, I haven't seen any cases of service getting cut off, or anyone even trying to break the DRM.
- Amazon is snooping what documents I have on my reader?
Only the documents you bought from them. They back up your annotations and bookmarks for the books you purchased from them, but not from any books you got from other sources or created yourself. You can also turn this feature off, if the idea of Amazon poking its nose in your stuff bothers you. Or you can never turn the wireless on and do all book purchases by USB, just to be completely paranoid.
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The end of the story is that proprietary formats and DRM suck, but that's the way it is and is going to be until Amazon can break away from it the way Apple did.
For the record: Amazon's .azw format is really just .mobi with the DRM. So if you can break the DRM, you can read the book on any device that can read .mobi, from Palm Pilots to computers. The tricky thing is that some of the books they sell are in .tpz (Topaz, sometimes .azw1) which allows them to imbed fonts in the file. I presume that this is an evolution of .mobi, but we really don't know, and other readers might not be able to handle it.