Amazon Kindle 2
5
Although the Kindle 2 has plenty of room to improve, the simple conclusion I've come to after using it for about 8 months is that it is a positively brilliant device. It enables me to read books, with a veritable library at my disposal, in places where I was stuck with blogs or not reading at all before. It works at the gym, on the train, over lunch, waiting for a bus, in the bright sunlight at the beach, and is _made_ for airline travel. This is all thanks to its one-button page-turn, scalable text size, convenient size and light-weight.
The kindle is perfect for anyone who ever loved to read, and I'm downright addicted to it.
I was a ravenous reader as a child, and the Kindle makes me feel like I'm 10 again, devouring a huge stack of library books that I can scarcely carry myself.
The beauty of the Kindle, of course, is that I no longer actually have to GO to the library. There are mobi e-books you can get from many public libraries, (but it's a total hack). Amazon offers full and immediate access to a number of books directly through the kindle on Amazon, for much cheaper than their paper counterparts. Nor do I need to restrict the number of books I have access to by how many I can carry.
An added bonus for me is that, now that I'm an adult and wish to supplement my reading with annotations, I can do it without navigating away from the page or the thought I wish to capture. If I were still in college or doing research of any kind, this would be quite valuable.
At it's new price, it's even more worth it, and if they make it to the $199 sweet spot I think it will be tremendously successful.
There are a few ways that the Kindle needs to improve before it really starts to challenge standard books. While I don't think any of these are a deal-breaker for most people, some people may want to wait for an update to the device that resolves some of these before deciding to invest in one themselves.
Selection
This is a big one. Amazon has done an impressive job of convincing many publishers to release their books on the kindle, but there are still a few holdouts and I hit a wall more often than I'd like to. It seems like they're concentrating on publishers with best-sellers rather than contemporary authors with critical acclaim, which may appease the masses, but it's a huge failure for anyone who truly loves reading (i.e. the most likely evangelists of the device).
Sharing
I know publishers are giddy with the prospect of future inability to let a friend borrow a book, but in their excitement, the seem to have lost sight of the fact that that aspect of book ownership brings a lot of value to the table, and lacking it, as kindle books currently do, devalues the book itself quite significantly. I'd pay $15 for a kindle book I could lend out within reason (say to a maximum of 10 people), or I'd even pay a few bucks each time I wanted to lend a book to another kindle user, but lacking any option whatsoever, I'm much more cautious about buying any book (and I think the value of most books without any lending or even chapter sharing capability is closer to $5 than the $10 they typically charge). A book is as close to a one-time-use item as it gets with select examples of brilliant literature. I pay just $.99 for a song I listen to thousands of times.
For real books, libraries exist. You can hack the digital books available at some libraries for use on the kindle, but the experience isn't that great. I'd gladly pay for subscription access to books by the month, but this is as-yet unavailable. My biggest fear is that, without this, the kindle won't ever become the ubiquitous choice, and I'll have my collection locked into a device that doesn't have everything I want to read available.
UI
Although it's a dramatic improvement over a standard book, there are some major issues with the UI on the kindle. The main menu where you choose a book to read lacks anything enticing whatsoever. It's positively utilitarian in its sort by last read and lack of book cover view. Every time I finish reading a book, it's work to decide what to read next, and that's a big failure. I view my books as a collection, and there's nowhere for this collection to live in an attractive state that I can show off or just admire myself
The actual process of reading is focused on novels and non-fiction. Short stories anthologies should commence at the chapters list since they're less suited to a cover-to-cover read. I also miss looking at the book covers themselves on any book. These are skipped automatically when you start reading something.
Speaking of chapters, it's impossible to tell where they exist when you're reading. I'm sure I'm not the only person that prefers to break at a natural place in a book, but finding how much further ahead that is in a book is a big mistake on the kindle if you don't actually make it there because the device takes that furthest page read location into consideration when it syncs the device. This makes it really easy to get lost if you travel to an annotation and then try to make your way back (particularly if the book includes its own notes linked to the back of the book).
Community & Book Recommendations
Or really lack thereof. Kindle has nothing except data that you have access to. It makes reading a single-minded activity, but anyone who loves reading knows that it's so much better when you have a community recommending books to you, or responding to your reactions of a book or a passage.
There's a site called Readernaut that comes pretty close to what I imagine the kindle should have as an online community based around the kindle. It enables you to respond to parts of a book, take notes, review it at the end, mark your progress in a rather impressive way, and all of this is shared with your friends. Something like this has the potential to reinvent the book club and make it tremendously prolific.
If Amazon took that model (preferably by acquiring that amazing site) and added a netflix-like book recommendation engine, I would be in heaven. Right now their recommendations exist only on the website, and lack the sophistication necessary to be useful. They assume everyone who reads anything likes Twilight and Dan Brown (please kill me), or that I just want to read other books by the same authors I've read in the past.
Searchability
Amazon's search goes further than most books (obviously), but they need a MUCH better search to be truly powerful. I don't care how this happens, but it seems like they should partner with google as an obvious solution (but google wants them to use an open standard and probably won't play ball until they do).
Their search right now doesn't work elegantly. You need to remember the exact word you're looking for and it better be relatively unique otherwise you'll never find the section of the book you're looking for. Searching for a phrase doesn't work at all. They've replaced the pagination phenomenon with a vague numbering sequence with numbers too high to be memorable. I've started highlighting almost any passage that i find remotely interesting just so I have a chance in hell of finding it again.
Bottom Line
If you have the money to spend on this device and are an avid reader, you won't be disappointed. It's a great tool that's bound to get better over time. All the software-related issues I've mentioned are fixable with a firmware update. The kindle 2 is a great update to the original device's hardware interface, and will remain relevant for quite a number of years (until they get touchscreen and color).
If you have any reservations or limited cash, I'd wait to see how other devices like the new sony readers are accepted by the marketplace. $259 is much less than I paid, but it's still a lot of money, and unlike the iPod (they are clearly modeling their business strategy after Apple's), the usage of the device for ebooks you already have isn't as good as kindle-specific books (no chapter navigation, no storage of your notes and books in the cloud).
While the kindle is a huge game-changer, and every reader I know who has purchased one absolutely loves it, I don't think it's the clear winner yet.
