, by mocowiz)
User Review
By Douglas H. Haden
Excellent, but…
The packaging is elegant cardboard(!). I'm not kidding.
Since I purchased Kindle Wireless Reading Device as a gift, the kindle did not come pre-registered to an Amazon account. Naturally, I wanted to read something more interesting than the user guide; so I called customer service to see what the deal is when transferring a Kindle Wireless Reading Device from one person to another. This call ended up being a fairly extensive conversation with an intelligent and articulate service-being about a great range of issues involving ownership transfer, sharing, privacy, and copyright protection.
Here is a summary of how kindles and the material purchased for them are related. When you buy reading material, it is associated with the Amazon account, and six licenses are granted with each purchase. That means that up to six Kindle Wireless Reading Device can be associated with an account, serially or in parallel. They will all have identical access to the materials bought on that account. A kindle can be de-registered, but its licenses are then lost, and they cannot be reassigned. However, the service-being told me that she has it within her power, case by case, to override the six license limit.
This information was in response to a story I invented where the six license limit would clearly not be in Amazon's interest (nor of course in the account holder's too). If you think about this, it's not hard to see how things could get seriously confusing after a little while. Amazon may have to hire a rabbinic court to adjudicate matters. What will really happen, I think, is that Amazon, like iTunes, will have to liberalize their policies considerably, for two reasons: First, popular demand (the market speaks). Second, crackers. The Kindle Wireless Reading Device will be cracked, if it already hasn't been. That, too, is a kind of market pressure. See iTunes, see iPhone.
Thus informed, I registered the kindle to my Amazon account and immediately bought a Jared Diamond book ($6). Seconds later it was aboard the kindle. Way easy, just like they said. There's a bunch of free stuff available, too, including the Bible. Worth every penny, probably even more.
Now to the thing itself. Very, very nice. It looks good, feels good in the hand, has good buttons, which are easy to operate on purpose but not so easy accidentally. But how does it read, you ask! Extremely well. In fact, it's much easier to read than a glossy magazine because of its low-glare surface, which hardly shows fingerprints. I can read it without strain in low light, high light, bright sunlight. It is easier to hold than a real book, because it's not always trying to close itself. What's more, it's easy to change font size. Heck, who needs fonts? A couple of tolerably good robot voices will read to you, male or female, slow, medium, or fast. I tried reading to the robots but got no response. Black and white illustrations display fairly well, even photos. The kindle is the size of a medium size book, but much thinner. Its screen is the size of a small paperback.
There is an unobtrusive cursor "|" which is moved around the page with a nubbin-sized joystick (the "five-way controller"). While reading, the page's bottom line shows the first line of the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary's definition for the word after the cursor. A button click brings up the dictionary, starting with that entry. A most excellent feature.
It's very easy to page forward or backward through the text with the dedicated buttons. It takes about second to page to or fro. Faster would be even better. You can get to the Table of Contents pretty quickly and thence to the beginning of any chapter. The kindle does not recognize page numbers, since they would change radically when you change font size; so Amazon provides the notion of location which is display independent. The bottom of the page shows the percent of the way through, the current location range displayed, and the location number for the end of the text. You can go to an arbitrary location.
You can also set bookmarks and return to them. Unfortunately, if the book in question has an index, it may not be useful, because it probably trades in page numbers, not locations. However, by way of compensation, you may search for arbitrary text strings. Kindle kindly displays the context around the locations where it finds the sought string and lets you jump to any of these locations and back to the search results at will. Search works well, better even than most indexes, and can do things no index can do.
I tried reading in bed. It was much easier to hold and use the kindle than any kind of book. It was more like holding a rigid magazine.
The Kindle Wireless Reading Device comes with a charging cable. I thought, that's ok, but do I have to supply a USB cable to connect to a computer? The answer is no: The supplied device is a USB cable that plugs into a compact wall charger. Very nice.
The big drawback, so far, is the huge issue of illiberal rights management. Related to that is Amazon interposing itself between your documents and the kindle. You may not directly put documents onto your own kindle. You must send a document to Amazon for conversion to the kindle's ultra-secret proprietary format, which they then return to you via Internet for free or via 3G network for ten cents. This is a privacy and control issue and not a trivial one.
In summary, it's totally wonderful if you ignore the digital rights management and privacy issues.
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