Tsaiberspace

I recently received an Amazon Kindle as a gift from thoughtful family members. The good stuff:

• The display is very nice to read in good light (better than paper, I think).
• The form factor is quite good. One-handed reading is a joy (and easier than with a thick paperback), and very doable in crowded environments (like public transit).
• Battery life is good (up to two weeks of commute-time WiFi-disabled use).
• The Kindle Leather Cover has a very nice feel to it that is superior to a plain paperback.
• Multi-book storage is great. I used to have the problem of finishing a book on my way in to work, leaving myself nothing to read on the way home. The Kindle makes that problem go away.

The bad stuff (and these are really mostly minor):

• The lack of obvious weatherproofing doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence. A paperback will easily handle a wait for the train in morning drizzly fog. I’m not so sure the Kindle is up to that task.
• In dim light, I think paper is easier to read (although things are already quite difficult to read at this point).
• Sprint and AT&T don’t really have anything to fear as far as data traffic is concerned. Book-purchase traffic is probably paid for by Amazon. Web browsing on the Kindle is just way too painful. The bandwidth itself is fine, but the display refresh rate is so slow as to be unusable. Kindles will not be replacing iPhones for portable web browsing any time soon. The only interesting terms-of-service-violating hack I can think of would be using the Kindle as some kind of tethering device.
• The slow display also makes page-flipping painful. Occasionally I will want to flip backwards to earlier pages to reread a paragraph or two. With a paperback, that is no problem. With the Kindle, flipping pages is almost painfully slow (1-2s per “page turn”). I really don’t see this as a viable textbook replacement.
• You lose some of the fun of a colorful book cover. It used to be interesting to see what other commuters were reading, but these days, as I see more people using Kindles and iPhones as reading devices, I think all reading commuters appear very homogeneous.
• At some point in time, my grubby hands will leave my white-plastic Kindle smeared with unattractive grubby little prints.

The economics of a Kindle purchase are quite compelling for avid readers of new books (Kindle e-books are typically priced at $9.99 or lower), but they are not as compelling for readers like me who buy used books or who frequent the public library.

The slow display is occasionally annoying in the rare page-flipping sessions, but otherwise, the form factor and multi-book storage easily overcome these minor shortcomings to make the Kindle a real winner.