Kindle 2: Long Term Impressions

So I have now been a kindle owner for about 8 months. What do I think now that I have actually lived with it for a while?

The Good:

The Kindle has easily become my main source of reading material. There have only been a couple of cases where I have resorted to a bound book and that is due to having already purchased the book, borrowing, or a gift. No matter what else bad I have to say about the device (and there is plenty of irks and niggles) it is extremely important to remember this simple fact... I read on it and seek books out in a format compatible with it first. End of story.

The best element by far for me has been as a travel companion. Packing the kindle in my bag in lieu of my typical 4-5 novel load has been the 'killer app' as far as I am concerned. A close second is the fact that if I need something new to read it does not take to long to have a new file downloaded.

The So-So:

Lack of a built in light of some sort is quite annoying. It should have been simple to include a little pop out led or something to make reading in low light conditions easy.

Glare... not something I really considered initially but this has been a surprisingly common annoyance. Especially difficult to deal with when using small direct light sources such as night stands. Because it is a direct light source (aimed at the screen) the angles often mean a glare point on the screen sometime necessitating odd angles (compared to a printed page) to avoid. I encounter this same phenomenon with glossy magazines and to a lesser extent with highly bleached stocked (very white).

Wireless enabled Battery life: Let me explain this one. First off... it lasts plenty long enough for day to day reading purposes... I think it might be possible to drain it in a day if you did little else than read (9-12 hours I think...) but it would be pretty uncommon. In realistic daily reading of <>

In the same vein I wish you could set a minimum battery life at which the device will shut down if a page has not been turned. IE at 25% or something. This is because if you forget to turn the radio off 25% battery life is still plenty to read a good long time before having to charge the device up... and picking up a dead device because you forgot to turn the radio off when you are ready to read is a truly irksome experience.... especially when on travel with no real charging options to hand.

Blogs/Magazine subscriptions: They sorta work but by and large they have more problems than they should. It should be mandatory for any segmented source of material to have a good table of contents with a memory for what articles have been read and which not etc... Blogs are just to hard to keep updated and really complicate keeping the device with a usable charge. Images should be included.

Samples: First X % of a book for a sample works relatively well for fiction stories but it sucks hairy balls when searching for a good reference/education book. You should be able to choose chapters for browsing this type of material. Certainly there should be some mechanism in place to keep someone from abusing this (ie downloading different chapters as they need them and never paying).

Amazon really should have allowed for more than a single font.

Needs Improvement:

Browsing capability: This is perhaps the single most frustrating element of the kindle. Not because it is bad, but because of how much more useful the device would be if the browsing functioned at a more tolerable pace. Shopping for a specific book is simple and works fine. Browsing for new books is a form of medieval torture even if you have a good 3g signal. Why? Because loading each page from whisper net takes 10-30 seconds if you are lucky. You often go through two or three levels of category lists before you get to a list of books. The list of books only provides about 6 books on a single screen and there are limited ways of filtering them. You only get a small thumbnail of the cover, title, author and about half a line of the intro on the top level of browsing. Selecting an individual book brings up a summary page of that book that again only has about 2 sentences worth of summary information often requiring a click on a more link for another page with the full summary. So to look at the summary info (equivalent to the inside flap or back of a paperback) you have to load the store front, drill down to a subcategory (say two minimum, Books, then subcategory like sci-fi), a page turn or three to find one that looks interesting, an initial summary page and then the actual summary page. All in all it could take 4-5 minutes to get to this point for the first book you are interested in... then figure 30-120 seconds for each subsequent one. While this is still ultimately less time than driving to a store etc... it is far below par of say standing at a shelf and grabbing a likely title and scanning the back/inside flap etc... In fact this is so annoying that I often go browse for new material at a book store... and take note of what interests me for later download. Browsing amazon with a real computer is a middle ground often used as well... but still sub par to a brick and mortar store for finding interesting new stuff.

How could they improve this? Easy. They need to download their catalog or some significant portion of it locally to the device so that page turns when browsing are the same as when reading. If the whole catalog cannot be reasonably maintained then say the top 25% should be, and it should allow for readers to choose favorite sub categories to maintain full updates on. This is still slow as hell but not intolerably so. In a similar vein they really should create similar repositories for research type web sites like wikipedia or even journal repositories. I would be more than willing to suffer a symbiotic (paired with computer etc...) life for some of the more data intensive sources if whisper net would not allow for something like downloading the top 10-25% of articles on wikipedia.

Wallpaper: In my original hands on review I mentioned this as a niggle. I have changed my mind. This is a major annoyance. First they should allow you to choose a single wallpaper instead of just having random ones cycle through. Two, you should be able to pick a selection of ones you want to be randomized. Three, you should be able to include your own pictures for use. I honestly think the decision of how amazon approached this is very indicative of their mindset regarding the ownership of content on the device. And it does not bode well when you consider it that way.

Content management: Simply not enough ways to filter. They really should have erred to the side of excess on the options for arranging your books... from customized arrangements to Library of congress and the dewy decimal system. A real simple miss they had was read/unread/partially read. They also should have provided the option to have the books in your library displayed the same way they are on the web site with the thumbnail icon of the cover art and summary information of the book should be stored locally. As is you have to pull it from the website even when you own it.

Another major hole in content management has to do with privacy and the option to give up material. You should be able to pass code your device and preferably certain categories you may not want people to easily access. One obvious category of this nature is say romance/erotica material. A parent may not want this to be accessible by their children. Another area of similar problem are such things as politics and religion. The nature of this device is that others want to see it and fool with it. This can lead to some awkwardness if you have material in your library that you may want to keep private for whatever reason. Similarly you should be able to banish some information from the device. For instance I was downloading some free material and ended up with a title I found quite objectionable. I don't want it on my device, I don't want it in my archive for later retrieval or for someone else to stumble across when using my device. While removing something permanently should be hard it SHOULD be possible. Currently it is not. In short the device should be made more friendly for the management of sensitive material be it professional, prurient or just plain personal.

There should be the ability to have the Kindle pull from a remote personal library rather than just the kindle store. That way if necessary I can maintain the safety of my own library or provide access to personal libraries of information. Yes you can keep the files on your computer... I am referring to the ability to point the kindle at this store of information for retrieving books.

Lending: Electronic file ownership should not be any different than print ownership. I should be able to loan my books out to friends and family with the ability to read kindle books. Amazon already maintains ownership information on its servers so managing a loaning system should be trivial. Heck I should be able to even do loans of a specific time limit (say two weeks). During the loan period I should not have access to the material. Barnes and Nobel has understood this with the nook. Here is hoping that Amazon updates the Kindle to provide a similar capability. They should also allow for re-sale/transfer of ownership. Last but not least. Amazon needs to make damn sure they never ever touch material on an end users device again. EVER. For those not familiar with what I am talking about here is what happened. A book was sold through Amazon where the rights were not properly handled. IE someone was selling a book they did not have the right to sell. When this was identified Amazon remotely removed the copies of the book for any user that had downloaded it and that contacted amazon (IE had the radio on). Again. Ownership of a file should not be treated any differently than ownership of a printed book.

Annotations: Taking margin notes is a pretty time honored tradition with books. The kindle does not manage it well. Mostly because of the short comings of using the device for any significant user input. I doubt this will be possible to solve on the device itself. What is needed is a full up computer program that allows you to use your computer for annotations.There probably should be that ability to interleave notes in multiple methods. IE display them in line via different fonts etc... astrix/footnote notation etc... and possibly even a separate outline document that links to relevant passages... ie read from the book and go to notes and then keep going in notes back to the book etc... This is an area where the kindle should shine over traditional print but does not due to artificial restrictions in place due to piracy concerns. If Amazon really wants to get into the text book business with the Kindle they really need to sort this kind of functionality out.

Document Types: Until a universal document type is created for passing digital text documents there should be every effort made to make the device capable of reading as many formats as possible... and any document conversion should be able to be done by the end user. I have documents I would love to maintain on the kindle but I cannot because it would entail sending the document to Amazon for conversion and the information is to sensitive to handle in that way.