![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Kindle: first impressions
Yes yes, I'm concerned about both DRM and Amazon's pricing policies. That's not what this entry is about.
So, first look: reading is comfortable. I'm currently reading 1632, which was a free download from Baen, and I'm not seeing the eyestrain I often get with paper yet. (Granted that I haven't read on the Kindle for six hours straight yet, the way I often try to do on paper. Give me time.) The text is crisp, the screen is not back-lit (so none of the computer-specific eyestrain issues are in play), and -- this may sound weird -- the lower contrast of black text on a light grayish background, versus black text on a bright white background, helps me a lot. There are seven or eight settings for font size; number three is working well for me, giving me text big enough to read comfortably but not so big as to overwhelm the device, which has a reading area smaller than a page in a typical paperback book. I'm getting two to three paragraphs on the screen at a time, probably the equivalent of a third to half a page of a paperback in the larger of the font sizes typically used for fiction.
(Nit: it was completely and utterly counter-intuitive to me that, on a device where most commands are reached via menus, changing the font size is behind a magic key on the keyboard. I did read the getting-started guide and I still got that wrong a few times before it settled into muscle memory.)
Paging is easy, though I faced some initial cognitive dissonance because I expect "back" to be on the left, not above "forward". (There are pairs of controls on each side, which I assume makes it handedness-agnostic, though the case imposes a strong preference toward using the controls on the right.) The "redraw" on paging was initially attention-grabbing but settled into being just part of the background after a few minutes. I don't feel slowed by it.
So for reading a book from front to back, it's great. And I'd like to use it for periodicals; there are magazines I've dropped not because I lost interest but because their text was too small. So far the periodicals available through Amazon are not the ones I want to read, but I assume more are being added all the time. I did subscribe to one blog, because I'm willing to pay a dollar a month to get Not Always Right pushed to me. (It gets too many posts per day for me to want to read via RSS and I just never get around to going to their site on a regular basis, but I always enjoy it when I do.) It looks like older blog posts are disappearing from the Kindle after I read them; I'm not sure if that's just how it works or if there's a setting for that -- or how that would be modified were I to bookmark an entry.
Aside: it looks like Hebrew is not one of the supported alphabets; can anyone confirm or deny? If that's wrong and it can support Hebrew natively (as opposed to via PDF), can anyone point me to a siddur?
Now some down-sides, some of which might change with more education:
Navigation within a document is kind of a pain. If there's a table of contents you can use that (entries are links), but flipping through a book looking for the right page is much slower on the Kindle than it is with a physical book. If there's no TOC, I don't know how I can easily jump to "chapter 8" or "page 100" (never mind what page numbers mean in this medium) or "Exodux 20:1". So I'm currently thinking that this is not a good platform for reference material, which is sad because that can be the kind of content you want to carry around compactly. There is a search feature that might help; I haven't spent much time with it yet, in part because:
There is a built-in keyboard (which is of course essential for search or for buying things from Amazon directly from the device), but the keys are small and hard to use. My not-too-enormous fingers are too big to use the pads of my fingers without mis-striking; I use a fingernail. And typing is pretty much going to be one-fingered; I'm using one hand to hold the Kindle and it appears that I can only touch-type (one- or two-handed) if I can use the pads of my fingers. So keyboard use is slow and awkward. (It's also required in order to register the device, by the way, so the keyboard is one of the first features I encountered.)
There is a built-in web browser (labelled "experimental"). Darned if I can figure out how to use it with any site that uses forms. For example, I couldn't figure out how to log in to Gmail with it. This probably requires a better mental model of the "cursor", which also comes up when clipping or highlighting text in a book. I have accidentally highlighted and clipped several items but have not yet managed to do it intentionally.
The Kindle works well for material formatted for e-books or in HTML. As you might expect, it is terrible for most PDFs, which by their nature preserve a page layout. You can zoom in, but then you need to use horizontal scrolling to read across the page, which is bad enough, but it looks like the Kindle's model is "paging", not "scrolling". There might exist PDF-formatted content that I could use on the Kindle -- you can format PDF for any size page, after all -- but in practice most PDFs are formatted for 8.5x11 or 5.5x8.5 pages, both of which are too wide for the Kindle at font sizes I can read. This did not surprise me, by the way; I just confirmed my suspicions.
Some things are just different, neither good nor bad. With an e-book there isn't really a notion of page numbers; you get a progress bar showing percent of the way through what you're reading. As a result, I really don't know how long a book I'm reading; I assume that in time I will learn to interpret the "203 of 12,204 blocks" (or whatever) notation. I realized when starting to read 1632 that I don't know what kind of time commitment I'm signing up for -- is it a 300-page book or a 700-page book? This question is easily answered using means external to the Kindle (I don't need you to tell me here). When I pick up a physical book I can, err, size it up; with the Kindle I can't, yet.
Relatedly, sometimes when I'm reading a physical book I want to check to see how close to the end of a chapter I am, for example to know if I can finish the chapter before having to do some chore. With a physical book I stick my finger on the current page while doing this so I can easily return to where I was reading. On the Kindle I can page forward, but I don't have the easy "return to where I just was" method.
The Kindle remembers where I am in each book, and it returns to exactly the state I was in when I last turned off the device. That's very handy -- no fumbling with bookmarks or flipping through pages to get to where I left off like with a physical book. Especially if periodicals pick up, these automatic bookmarks will be handy -- it's rare that I'm reading only one book, magazine, etc at a time.
I don't have a good sense of battery life yet; the only time it's run out on me so far was when I thought I'd turned it off but had only put it in a sleep state. I also don't know what its capacity is. It's easy to move things between it and a computer via USB, but I probably won't pull anything off of it until I have to (or I know I don't want it, in which case I'll just delete it). You can also email documents to the Kindle, and for a fee you can use the 3G network built into the device to do so. (The free email depends on the Kindle being on a wireless network.)
So that's where I am right now -- very much liking it for some things but a little frustrated with others. Time will tell if the latter are just needing to climb a learning curve or intrinsic to the device.
no subject