To be clear, I am a full-on Kindle fan. In fact, I get all huffy when I read reviews by 20-somethings who knock the $259 pricetage or oldsters who crab that they could never read a book without paper pages. Kindle is a total miracle, works like a dream, and is worth every penny, not only because it travels and reads beautifully, but because it taps into the world’s most effective, organized, affordable and expansive bookstore. So when Amazon announced a free Kindle-like application for PC, I rushed to download it. (Click to continue)

To be clearer, I use the Kindle largely as a research tool for my nonfiction writing. My goals are to use technology to write history. Right now I’m researching Theodore Roosevelt for a future book, so I started by reading his audtobiography on Kindle, or to be more accurate, I had Kindle read it to me while I worked on bills, cleaned the office, made a sandwich, road in a car, took an airplane. I’ll read a dozen Roosevelt biogrpahies before I really dig into my own research next year. The ability this allows me to come up to speed on a topic during formerly-lost moments is heaven. I can download books from anywhere, take notes, and send those notes to my PC. Often the stuff I want to read are the very old and obscure items that have been added to the Kindle library and cost only a buck or two, or are free. Kindle recently added 20,000 free books and a few of those are about or by Teddy Roosevelt.

So now you can upload a sort-of-a Kindle onto your PC. It costs you nothing, and if you upload free books from the Kindle Store, they cost you nothing as well. You’d think that would keep the cranky people quiet, but apparently, they want more. If they pushed a button and Amazon CEO Steve Bezos drove to their homes and read a free NY Times bestseller aloud to them – they’d still crab on.

Fantastic free e-book reader, unless you have a Kindle or write nonfiction

But all that said, having just spent an hour with the new Kindle for PC, I’m not so impressed. Sure, it works beautifully and costs nothing. When I click the icon on my desktop, the e-book format appears onscreen. My PC has been transformed into a book with very few buttons. That part is cool.

Upload a book from the Kindle Store – a free one if you like – and it appears. The font is crystal clear and can be greatly enlarged. You can expand or contract the width of the page on the screen, As with the portable Kindle, one clicks at the right to advance to the next page, and clicks on the left to move back. The computer returns the reader to where he left off. If you have a Kindle, the PC will "synch" to the page where you left off. Then when you pick up the Kindle, you’re at the page you reached while reading on the PC. Very cool.

If I had no Kindle, I’d be thrilled. But I do have a Kindle, and it reads aloud to me, which the PC version does not. Because I am usually doing history research, I like to highlight passages on the Kindle and sometimes take notes on the little keyboard. The PC version does not do that yet. I often search for words and phrases within a Kindle book, but that feature hasn’t been added to the PC reader. The PC isn’t portable, unless I add it to my laptop.

So pretty much everything I bought the Kindle for, the PC version doesn’t do. The incredible thing about Kindle is the way the little plastic thing acts like a book, or a talking book – anywhere, any time. It has long battery life, holds over 1,000 books, uploads books in seconds wirelessly, weighs nothing.

To its credit, my PC Kindle can read any book I’ve ever dowloaded to its portable cousin. I can "see" on a wide color screen everything that is contained in the portable plastic book. The two Kindles can talk via their wireless "whispernet". But so far, they have very little to say to one another.

I was looking for something more, not less. I have no plans to sit in front of a computer at my desk and read a book. If God wanted us to do that, he wouldn’t have created the Kindle – or the book.

For those who want free books or want to instantly download bestsellers for $9.99 and save a tree, this new PC application is ideal. I imagine it works well on those tiny portable computers too. But for us history writers, and probably for professors, researchers, and students, the Kindle for PC is still in its Cro-Magnon phase.

But it is free. And it does give you access to over a third of a million digital books in the blink of an eye. And if you’re sitting at your computer watching Hulu, or YouTube or playing online poker – or worse – would it kill you to read a good book instead?

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved.