Active Reading with the Amazon Kindle

Emily Dickinson Kindle Screensaver Credit: Cheneworth Gap

I have hundreds of megabytes worth of free books that I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg and various other sources online, which presents me with the dilemma of finding a way to read all of them. Reading them at my desktop is uncomfortable, although I have done this, sitting at a computer monitor for hours to read a novel. I’ve gotten through a couple of books on my cell phone, but the small screen is also headache-inducing. My OLPC would make a great reading device, but it takes a long time to boot and crashes when I try to access large text files.

That’s why I decided to try out Amazon’s second-generation Kindle, an iPod for books. I was drawn to the fact that the screen is not backlit, which is easier on the eyes, and the device uses very little energy to render text, making it portable on long trips. Plus, as text-files are extremely small, I knew the device’s several gigs worth of storage space was something I would never exhaust. Could you imagine telling someone they’d be able to store thousands of books and hundreds of hours of music on devices smaller than a dimestore novella twenty years ago? Technology is magic.

Since this is a positive review, I’ll start with the bad and get that out of the way. At $360, the Kindle is very over-priced. I would value this device around $200 max, and there are cheaper e-readers out there with more features, such as the Sony PRS-700BC. Additionally, the Kindle should really be priced at $390 as you should absolutely buy a $30-$50 cover for it. I made the mistake of buying just the Kindle, and got a scratch on my screen within two weeks of owning it, just from carrying it around in my messenger bag with pens and a clipboard.

With the capacity to store thousands of books on the device, it’s an incredible oversight that Amazon provides no way to organize books on the Kindle. Despite organizing my library into folders by category on the device itself, all of my books are displayed in a single list sortable by title, author, and last accessed. This is fine now, while I only have four pages of books to flip through, but will become unacceptable years down the road, after I’ve downloaded dozens of public domain texts from Gutenberg and need to find that one passage in The Age of Reason to quote in a post.

One final gripe is that the Kindle offers an incredibly useless feature, the capability to subscribe to blogs. For a small monthly fee, you can subscribe to a wide selection of well-known blogs. Whoopdee-doo. What use is it to subscribe to a link-blog like Boing Boing on my Kindle, if I can’t navigate to anything the site links to? That would be as worthless as looking at ideonexus on the device.

Edgar Allan Poe Kindle Screensaver Credit: Stillframe

Which brings me to the cool stuff. I am enthralled with the idea of being able to download newspapers onto the kindle for a small monthly fee, even if I have no intention of using the feature. Unfortunately for me personally, I read the news with an open text editor to take notes and links for later reference on ideonexus. Had this device come out ten years ago, newspapers might have found a viable way to survive the Information Age. Reading a newspaper on the back porch or at the breakfast table is a very relaxing and enlightening habit, and the Kindle enables this, making it a great gift for the Baby Boomers in your life.

Another feature Boomers will appreciate is the thriftiness of the device. I easily blow through a couple-hundred dollars a month in (mostly used) books from Amazon. Two inconveniences of this practice is having to wait a week for books to arrive in the mail and having to pay delivery fees. The Kindle 2 comes with a free, built-in cellular connection, which allows for buying books from Amazon right from the device. The e-versions of books are usually about half the price, if you factor in the shipping, and the book downloads directly to the Kindle, restoring the all-important “instant gratification” factor that is missing from online shopping.

One bit of advice though, keep the connection turned off except to synch the device, as it drains the battery. Thanks to the Kindle’s E-Ink display, the device uses very little energy. After a week of heavy reading on it, my Kindle’s battery hadn’t even lost a quarter of its charge.

My favorite characteristic of the Kindle is how it enables active reading. I read paper-based books with my cell-phone on hand to take notes on everything I read, diligently copying passages down into word files (I hate to deface a paper book by highlighting pages) and summarizing important passages. The Kindle interweaves this practice into the e-book. With the keyboard built into the device, I can take notes directly in the book I’m reading and highlight passages on screen. It’s like I’m adventuring through realms of knowledge and taking photos of things I see along the way. : )

The Kindle is not for everyone, but my fellow bookworms out there should definately consider an e-reader to support their addiction.