Seacoast History Blog #40
March 25, 2009 

Kindle2: Our First Impressions

I refuse to go rhapsodic. The Kindle2 may be the equivalent of the first effective light bulb or the first working TV set. I think it is. Time will tell.

I also refuse to refute all the naysayers who insist they cannot live without the feel and smell of paper when reading. The Kindle2 is not out to destroy the book. Books will survive. This is something else altogether. For people who whine about the $369 pricetag, I can only say – my first electronic typewriters cost $2,000 and it could only hold two paragraphs worth of data. Get over it.

My goal here is simply to lay down a few details for those who are curious or on the brink of Kindledom. Here we go.

The container it comes in looks like a plastic microwave dinner tray. That fits inside a shockingly small Amazon cardboard box, smaller than many books. The Kindle electronic book reader is, itself, the size of a trade paperback, but as thin as a flat crust pizza. It looks and works like the clipboard thing used on Star Trek, Next Generation – a flat screen reader with a tiny keypad below. I’ll probably never use the keypad. Only half a dozen larger buttons are needed to run the thing.

It feels fragile. I am afraid to drop it. I won’t let my wife leave it on the floor or set it on the kitchen table when it might get spilled on. I hand it to people gingerly. I am going to buy the extended warranty with the one-time crash replacement policy. We’re going to get the heavy duty padded carrying case.

The screen is slightly smaller than I had hoped. The biggest font size is just within the range of my very bad eyesight. I wish the image would reverse (white letters on black) so I could see it better. But for a normal person, this is ideal.

The sound feature is brilliant. Thanks to my poor vision, I’m used to having a robot read to me. My computer reads everything I write in that Steven Hawking voice. But my computer is tied to my desk. The Kindle reads at a moment’s notice. Flick the joystick with your thumb and the robot voice begins where you left off. Yesterday I read a few pages, then turned on the robot while I was making breakfast. Five pages later, I turned off the robot and ate while reading. The volume is controllable. The speakers are fair. The voice is expressionless and mispronounces lots of words (including "Kindle") – but it is a book that can talk, anywhere, anytime, and that is miraculous.

The shopping and loading features will change the world. I didn’t buy the Kindle2 for research or for reading heavy important books that I need to own, and pour over, and mark up. I got it for recreation. The Kindle is my road to the fluff fiction and the contemporary literature that I hear about on the radio, but never buy. In fact, I don’t think I will buy any books on Kindle that I would have purchased in paper. I don’t want to OWN Kindle books, I want to slide through them and move on.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, believes people will read more when they own his Kindle. I agree. I ordered a couple of magazines that I never buy. If I want to tell my wife about a new book, rather than send an email, I just go to the Kindle Store and download the first chapter – for free. "Check the Kindle, dear," I can say now. If she likes it, probably for $10, she can download it while waiting in an airport, or attending a conference, or sitting out in the back yard or on the beach – if I let her take it to the beach.

Kindle will become, I think, as much a way to decide what not to read, as to purchase. And for me, with my bad eyes, it is a way to move just a few pages ahead in a story or article. Five minutes here, 10 minutes there. Since the machine remembers where I am, I don’t have to. I will listen to it in the car with headphones.

The Kindle will not stop me from buying books well narrated on CD or tape. It will not stop me from picking up books at yard sales or ordering them used online, or buying them new in the bookstore. It will simply expand what, when, and where I read.

For example, I like so many others uploaded a copy of UR by Stephen King. If you read only paper books, you’ve never seen it. King wrote a short novella about a haunted Kindle and it is available, of course, only on the Kindle. It cost $2.99. If it stinks, I won’t be angry that it is sitting on my shelf. If it’s good, I may start reading King again.

Mentioning King reminded me of Poe. I just clicked over to Amazon to see how much it costs for his poetry. The Complete Poetical Works cost a dollar. There is another version for free. Between this sentence and the previous sentence, I downloaded every verse Poe ever wrote to my Kindle. Poe would puke at the price. But Poe is dead, and I win.

Another example: I just listened to all 11 audio tapes of The Jungle by Upon Sinclair, the classic socialist novel about gross meat packing plants in Chicago in 1905. I listened on a beat up old cassette tape player. That got me thinking about Sinclair, the author. Where did he go? What else did he write? What was his life like?

I could have found the info on the Web, but I looked in the Kindle Store. I know, with all the books I need to read for work, that if I bought the latest biography on Sinclair, I would never read it. I have proof – all the unread biographies just above me on the shelf. So yesterday I downloaded the free chapter of the latest bio to the Kindle2. This morning I listened to the Prologue while making breakfast. If I get through the free chapter, maybe I will buy the whole book – maybe I won’t care any more. That’s what the Kindle is good for – free samples, fresh starts, false starts. It’s an experimental playground for readers.

I am itching to see how well it accepts the documents I will upload from my computer. I write for a living, and it will be handy to carry a copy of my own manuscripts around. This summer, on Smuttynose Island, I will see if it also gets email. But it isn’t about email. It isn’t about a color screen or videos or surfing the Web. The Kindle is about reading, or being read to by a robot.

I got the Kindle2 to fill in pieces of my life with reading. It can hold more books than I will ever read and it isn’t much bigger than a Pop Tart. It pulls bestsellers out of the air in less than a minute. I don’t own a cell phone, or a Blackberry, or an iPod or an iPhone or even a laptop. There’s nothing there for me. But I got a Kindle, baby. And it knows my name.

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