On Saturday I made one of my frequent impulse buys in the shape of an Amazon Kindle. They sell them in Tesco now, you know, and for £111 I thought it was worth a punt. My sister showed me her e-reader a few months ago and while I was amenable to its flirting, I couldn't see myself using one enough to justify the cost - forgetting, temporarily, that justifying the cost plays no part whatsoever in 99 per cent of my purchasing decisions. I'm the guy who, almost a year ago, spent £1,700 on filmmaking software that has yet to process a meaningful frame of footage. So, at the weekend, I became a non-reading Kindle owner - safe in the knowledge that if it became the latest in my circus of white elephants, at least I'd given my Clubcard points a boost.
But this time there is no elephant in the room. As soon as I slid the power switch I fell in love with it. Despite its fairly undemanding brief of displaying text, I honestly think it's the most impressive application of technology I've used in years. To obtain reading material, you simply pair the Kindle with your Amazon account (which is a simple as logging in to it), and from then on any book you download is sent wirelessly to the device within seconds. Even if, like me, you are blighted with slow broadband, an average book is only 500 kilobytes in size. There is also an option to transfer books via USB if you want to avail yourself of titles from sources other than Amazon's Kindle Store, and it can also display other file types including Word documents, jpegs and PDFs (albeit in monochrome). That said, you probably won't feel the need to stray beyond said Kindle Store which offers over 700,000 books, newspapers and periodicals with many classic titles available free of charge. Also free are the generous samples - at least the first two chapters - that you can download if you're unsure about committing to a purchase. Full book prices vary depending on content, but many new fiction titles will only set you back £5.00.
The e-ink display only consumes battery life when it is refreshed (ie, when you move to the next page), which means that single hour long charge will apparently provide you with a month's worth of reading assuming an hour's use per day - handy if you want to go on holiday without leads and adaptors. The powerless display is such an unusual concept in this backlit world of ours that it's a little disconcerting at first - the device shows an image even when it's turned off and you keep thinking to yourself, 'Is that really not draining the battery?' The display itself is very high contrast and exceptionally detailed, comfortably resolving fine images without pixellation. Everything text based is adjustable, from font size to line spacing and even margins. You can also rotate the screen to a landscape orientation if that's your 'bag'.
For those who enjoy their prose without any emotion or cadence there is a text-to-speech feature which is optional on most e-books and is easily employed via the built-in speakers or headphone socket. It does a fairly impressive job despite sounding like John Major doing an impression of Stephen Hawking, though I can't think of a useful application for it among sighted owners unless you want to swot up on something while you're driving. It's certainly no replacement for an audiobook, but you wouldn't expect it to be.
The best thing about the Kindle though, from my point of view, is that it makes reading a pleasure. You'd think it would remove all the magic from a book - the smell of the paper, the dog eared corners, the almost inevitable spot varnished cover - but I find that it breathes new life into it. Whether that's just its novelty value remains to be seen but with fewer words on its screen compared with the average printed page, progress feels rapid and encourages engagement. E-books don't seem to be subject to piracy in the same way as music so everyone is getting a fair deal and their convenience is undeniable - it's like having a branch of Waterstone's in your sitting room.
So is this the end of the printed word? Amazon claims to have sold more e-books than printed books last year, which surprised me, but pushing nostalgia aside it's easy to see the environmental benefits of this. I still think there will be a place for the printed word but given the option to charitably donate all my books in exchange for electronic versions I can't see any reason why I wouldn't do it. Books take up so much space and there aren't many that you read twice. This is one seismic cultural shift that I'm happy to go along with. What book loving knowledge seeker wouldn't endorse such a simple means of sharing ideas? I honestly think the Kindle will encourage me to read a lot more than I used to, and that's the biggest endorsement of all.
9 comments:
Rekindled you interest in reading, has it?
This from the man who once said, "Email? Never!"
(I'm just jealous because I want one.)
My only problem is that it is not easy to go back and check something, like you can flick back through pages of a book. That aside, it will be great for my holiday, and some books are really cheap. Daughter and I wil have to swap kindles when we finish our books though! :)
I love my kindle too. I travel all the time and it's the best. One tip - if you and someone else you know has a kindle, you can deregister and then register your kindle in your friend's name to get access to their books. Kinda like a new age form of borrowing!
I also impulse-bought a kindle literally just last week and I too am in love with it- and maybe a bit too addicted to buying books off the kindle store. I've already splashed out on over £100's worth of ebooks, erp. I'll get through them eventually! My only gripe with the kindle is that manga and comics in general are very hard to read with it and the controls for reading manga on it aren't very well adapted. Manga is the one thing I wont be buying again from the kindle store. But for normal books, it's amazing, and I love how cheap buying books for kindle is compared to going to waterstones.
Our house is a clutter of hundreds of books. Sentimental value of a few aside, I'd love to swap the rest for a space-freeing Kindle. Only current drawback: I like autobiographies that often have interesting photos and Kindles can't do those yet, can they? But ohhhh - - when they can - -
Ariane - I'd lend you mine but you'd never want to return it.
Jazzyjules - Yes, the 'go to' function isn't very useful. I've found myself wanting to check something and having to flip back page by page is a bit annoying.
Jon - good tip. I did wonder if that was possible.
Emenia - yes, I don't think I'd use mine for primarily visual content. Some books require the printed page but thankfully most don't.
Daphne - it actually renders photographs and illustrations very well, though not in colour of course. Perfectly adequate for the purpose you mention though.
I was bought one as a gift, and while I now have an iPad for multimedia purposes the kindle beats everything else for reading hands down. A really good book is something you lose yourself in, and it's easy to be lost in a kindle.
Curiously, my romantic side always considered they'd be best for technical texts rather than fiction or 'indulgence' books, but since most technical stuff I read in in A4 PDF format this isn't the case (althgh the iPad is ideal).
And I'm another who has been accumulating an ever greater number and weight of books through life... I look at my parents' house, which is nearly collapsing under the weight of books, and can now breathe a sigh of relief.
You don't acquire books or read like I do, then.
I am sure you can buy books easily from Amazon - but I almost never buy books from Amazon. It's a last resort. I buy books from second-hand bookshops and dealers, in person where I can look and flip through and touch in person. I trade books on www.bookmooch.com. I borrow books from friends. I borrow books from the library. The one thing I don't do is buy new books. I read a lot - it would be way too expensive!
My wishlist is kept on Bookmooch and is some 400 books long now; I am currently reading at least 20+ books, for certain values of "currently," and my physical to-be-read pile is now a good few hundred books tall.
I also acquire eBooks now and again, either from enlightened authors like Cory Doctorow or Peter Watts, who give away downloads, or when I really want something very urgently using P2P networks - and unlike music, which is disposable, I almost always go and buy or mooch a physical copy ASAP if it's any good.
New books are less than half a percent of my reading, and only when I can get them at a discount, generally. Maybe twice a decade I love a book so much that I dash out and buy the sequel or whatever - and then, I am usually disappointed.
But I can tell you that there is a lot of eBook trading online; just because you don't know where or how does not mean it doesn't happen.
So whereas this device might work for you, it's not quite one for everyone yet. I am a great and inveterate reader, and yet your model of book acquisition is so profoundly alien to me that I felt I had to post and explain how the other half lives, as it were.
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