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On Thursday, I bought a Kindle 2 . And with it, I expected to usher in the future. A bold new era, wherein I would convert my fairly massive book collection to a simple, thin device. How’s it gone? Read on dear friend and see!

Expectations

First, I should tell you the kinds of books I read and my expectations. I’m not a big novel person. Generally, I read technical books, books on business and marketing, and philosophical books. One of the books that was nudging me towards the Kindle was in fact, Richard Dawkins’ newest book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution which is currently in hardcover, and therefore expensive at $30.00 list price. The Kindle price was a mere $9.99! A real smokin’ deal. I’ve also been reading a lot of Seth Godin’s books, such as Purple Cow and Permission Marketing , both of which are also available as Kindle editions at a substantially improved price. By far, however, my current book collection is mostly programming books, a category that the Kindle is decidedly not known to be good at.

Given the bad reputation of the Kindle with regard to technical books, my expectations were not very high, but I still had hope. In fact, the single biggest reason I wanted the kindle was to reduce my technical book collection from the three full bookcases full of books I currently have to perhaps one small device. I very much wanted to achieve a more Zen-Like simplicity in my house and possessions. Clearing it of the clutter that is, unfortunately, required by my line of work.

Realities

Which brings us to the first question of Kindle success, can it be used to replace all of my old books? And the answer is… sort of.

The problem here is several fold. First off, if you want to replace your old books, they all have to be available on the Kindle. This actually isn’t too bad of an issue. All of the “current technology” books that I wanted to replace were definitely available, either as direct replacements, or through newer editions. The few that were not available directly on the Kindle store (mostly Pragmatic Programmer books) I found were available directly through the publisher’s website. The bigger problem though, is one of cost. Programming books are expensive! Replacing all those books at once was definitely going to be a no-go. I actually took some of my books to a local used bookstore to see if they would be interested in buying them. I figured if I could get even a quarter or half the price of the original cover price, I’d be in good shape. I was shocked, however, to find that for a stack of about 10 books, they were willing to pay only about $6.00. $4.00 of which was for one particular book. I was reminded, at this point, of one of the arguments by Kindle-haters, that one loses the right of first sale on eBooks. To them, I say “Have you ever tried to sell a used dead tree book? You may have the RIGHT to sell it, but finding someone who will pay you anything for it is nigh impossible.” I also tried selling some of my books online as used books . So far, no bites there either. The fact is, people like new over used, and books, like cars, apparently lose about 90% of their resale value just by you taking them home. So my plans of replacing my existing books immediately were pretty much dashed. I’ll probably do it eventually, but just not today.

A common question, of course, is that of the quality of reading said technical books if you do replace them. The usual argument is that people like the “feel” of reading physical coding books. That there’s value in being able to flip through the pages to find something in particular. I can definitely see the merit of this argument. Reading technical books on the Kindle is definitely a degraded experience if you want to be able to flip through the pages in search of something. On the other hand, the ability to cut out code samples and save them as text for later use, and the ability to get rid of reams and reams of tree carcasses I think more than offsets this minor change in work habits. As far as navigation alternatives, I’m finding I simply use the table of contents and the search more often, and so far, this seems to be working great. I’ve only got a couple of technical books on the Kindle so far, so we’ll have to see what happens as I get more real hardcore reference material on there.

Something that would make a nice improvement here would be a “scan” button. One that enabled rapidly flipping of pages in a chapter to help facilitate finding a particular passage. The problem is, the Kindle screen refreshes too slowly for this to be practical.

An oft-cited benefit of the Kindle is it’s eInk screen. As far as reading quality goes, it’s reputation is certainly well deserved. However, this is in fact one area where I think the hype goes a bit beyond the truth of the matter. Before buying the Kindle, I had a lot of trouble visualizing how big the screen really is. The answer is, the size of the Kindle 2 screen is nearly perfect for it’s purpose. I’m actually really glad I got the smaller one rather than the DX. The entire device is almost exactly the size of a large Moleskine . So if you are curious to know if you’ll like the size or not, go to your local stationary store, and check out the feel of one of these notebooks. The screen itself is inset somewhat, and naturally, smaller. But it really is just right for most reading. Anything smaller would have been too small. Would I like a bigger screen? Sure. But not at the cost of a bigger device.

That said, other than the size of the screen, I don’t see that the quality is really that substantially better than say, the screen on my iPhone. The resolution is simply not a huge deal for me. In fact, the fact that it is greyscale only tends to be a bit off-putting for me. I like color. More importantly, however, I notice a disturbing “ghosting” effect that seems to occur as you go from page to page. Almost as if the previous page doesn’t always erase completely. In general practice, this isn’t really an issue for readability, but it definitely is annoying considering the cost of the device. This would be something I would see Steve Jobs going apeshit over if it happened on Apple hardware, and it’s disappointing that the Amazon engineers are not similarly driven to perfection. On the other hand, I recognize that eInk is a new technology, and it is due in large part to the use of eInk on this device that it gets it’s long battery life. Because of this, I can pretty much overlook this minor issue. Again, it doesn’t affect readability, it is only due to my looking at the screen with a critical eye that I even notice it.

Speaking of battery life. I think the rumors you have heard are true. Two or three days with the wireless on, and weeks without it. Because of this disparity, I definitely recommend turning off the wireless whenever you can. If you go to access the Kindle store with it off, it helpfully offers to turn it back on.

Converting Existing eBooks

While I have had the Kindle, I have taken several different kinds of PDFs and converted them various ways to get them onto the device. My results have been mixed. For novels, or books with mostly all text, you really can’t go wrong. Anything more complicated and you have to take special steps. (By complicated, I mean things with graphics and code.) What I found is that Stanza , though it’s a great app, simply doesn’t cut it for converting these kinds of books. I tried another app, called Calibre , which is open source, and does a much better job, though it’s UI is SO buggy it’s appalling. Even Calibre, however, had a hard time converting the code to a proper monospaced font. In the end, the best conversion service I found was Kindle’s own free conversion service. To use it, you just email your doc to the email address you set up for your kindle @free.kindle.com. A few minutes later, it responds with your converted document. The only issue I have found is that because you’re emailing it, some large documents will have issues getting through your mail server. You can also email it to @kindle.com where it will wirelessly send it directly to your kindle for a small ($.15 as of this writing) fee. This has the added advantage of syncing your last read location among multiple devices if you also read using the Kindle app on iPhone, as I do.

One big disappointment I had was that the book organization tools in the Kindle kinda suck. There’s no ability to sort one’s books into folders, and over time, the screen gets very cluttered. I can’t even imagine if you had hundreds or even thousands of books on this device. It would be a disaster.

It’s Not a Tablet

The final aspect I wanted to be sure to mention, is that of web browsing on the Kindle. You may have heard, the Kindle has both an experimental web browser built in, as well as the ability to download blogs and read them. The reality of this is, you should pretend these features don’t exist. The web browser is crap, and they charge $2 per month to download blogs that are free on the web. Money that I am willing to bet doesn’t even go to the authors of the blogs. (Note: This is conjecture, I don’t know if the bloggers actually get any money from Amazon) So in short, just forget those features. This is not an iTablet. This is a single-tasker. It reads books. That’s it. And if that’s what you want, then you’ll be happy. If you want more. Wait for the iTablet from Apple.

Summary

Pros:

Great book reader. Easy to use. Nice styling. Long battery. Easy to read screen.

Cons:

Web experience sucks. Book organization sucks. Some small detail issues. Replacing existing books is expensive.

PS: As a published author I feel I have a right to comment on the subject of the text-to-speech mechanism in the Kindle 2. My opinion is, it’s awesome. Authors are crazy to oppose it. I ultimately have no control over whether it WILL be enabled on my book or not, that’s up to my publisher, who actually owns the rights to my book in that regard. However, I do get paid royalties on my book whether it’s sold in electronic form or printed form. To me, buying it in electronic form gives you the right to listen to the TTS version of it. Additionally, it opens my book up to people who might otherwise have had issues reading it.