Do you have a Kindle?
My cuñada DKL mentioned this on a post awhile back (can’t remember which one) because she knows what a gadget junkie I am. And I’m really trying to like it and begin coveting it, but I can’t honestly see the benefit of having one (even if I could – at the moment they aren’t sold outside the US).
First of all, with a $359.00 purchase price and $10.00 per book, it’s not really any more economical than buying normal books, well, until you’ve maybe bought about 50 of them. Also, I’m suspicious of the “revolutionary electronic-paper display that looks and reads like real paper”. Could it actually be much different from a computer screen (I cannot read long texts on a computer screen)? And what happens when you’ve reached the 200 book limit?
Basically, I can’t see the advantage of a Kindle over having one of these fabulous Toshiba lightweight beauties, which of course would do a lot more. But if anyone would like to convince me otherwise, I will add a Kindle to my gadget wish list, though it’ll definitely come after the Toshiba Portégé, the iPhone and the 3-in-1 HP. 🙂
casa azahar 
I like books. I like the fact that they are different weights and different sizes. I like the faint smell of ink when you first open one. I like the different papers books are printed on. Another generation will learn that these things I like don’t matter and I’m sure will prove me a romantic fool. Still, I like books.
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They’re also coming out with screen prototypes that are as thin as heavy-grade paper and bendable, wirelessly linked with your device. Maybe one day you can buy ink- and paper-scented drops to sprinkle before you start reading. 🙂
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Of course, you can’t put your virtual “books” on a shelf and make a library of them, either.
Nor can you find a favorite passage by where the book falls open after many readings or by recalling its general location in the thickness of pages.
I love the feel and smell of real books. I love the texture of the type on the page, the thickness in my hands and how they look on the shelf or in the pile by my bed far too much to be swayed by and device which is supposed to replace them.
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I too am a book junkie. The look and feel of them, the smell. In addition to the different weights and sizes, there are the different fonts and typefaces used. Does Kindle replicate that? I think not.
It also was not clear to me by the advertisement as to whether all those newspapers that are automatically updated are free or if there is a charge. I know that on my computer I can go to those websites and read all day for free.
If you have an iPhone, you can already download books to that, so Kindle is competing with that.
When you look at the cost of books, $9.99 does not seem like such a bargain to me. Most paperbacks are available for around $7 or $8 new. There are lots of used book dealers around where the hardback books are under $5, and the paperbacks even cheaper. If you check on Amazon, there are lots of books available for under $10. Plus, there is the library — where I can check out books for free. They get the best sellers as soon as they hit the list, too. Jim says it is a good thing we have a library, there is no way we could afford to buy all the books I read. Plus, once I am finished with the book, I can take it back and let them store it.
It brags about being light weight, only 10.5 ounces. Batteries must be heavy. The book I am reading right now is 13 ounces. I don’t have to recharge it, either.
Now, if I was going on a long trip where there was electricity available for recharging, I would think this was a great idea. But with my present lifestyle, I can think of a lot of other things I’d rather spend that $350 on.
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Of course, there is the environmental issue…. even with the use of recycled paper, books are not environmentally friendly.
I worked in bookstores for years and I know just how many books ended up being stripped (covers stripped off) and put in the garbage. Even though those books are now sent for recycling, most municipal recycling centres cannot handle the bulk of the paper they receive on an annual basis. A lot of paper ends up in the dump, despite efforts to reclaim material.
I had always felt that the stripping an turfing of mass market paperbacks was a travesty. On one hand, publishers don’t want to bear the expense of transporting unsold mass market books back to the warehouse. On the other, they want to protect their business interests so will not allow unsold books to be donated or charity.
When you think how many good uses unsold books could be put to…. Donated to hospitals, inner city schools, prisons, seniors homes…. So many deserving charities. Instead, they end up either being recycled or in the land-fill.
Of course, you also have to weigh the impact of yet another plastic item which, while replacing thousands of books, has its own impact on the environment.
Which is worse?
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Ahhhh, luddites. Gotta love you all. 🙂
az, the electronic ink thing really is different from a computer screen. The way it works is that, like ink, it absorbs light, rather than a screen which projects light. So it’s not tiring to look at. At least, that’s what I’m told, I don’t have one (although I’m considering it).
The price is high, but what almost swings it for me is that as well as downloading new books I could download 25,000 free out of copyright books from Project Gutenberg and other similar sites.
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But which will still be around and usable in 100 years? My bet is on books. Although I have heard we are in the “era of bad paper”, and that recent books will disintegrate due to the acid in the pages. Unlike papyri, which are still legible after thousands of years. Makes you think.
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Luddite! 😉
Seriously though, I’m not suggesting doing away with books as a whole, and anyway electronic books can be archived just as easily as paper ones.
Personally, I get most of my books second hand so I’d still be mostly using the paper versions, but I reckon for travelling (which I’m doing an awful lot of at the moment – bad me, blame a combination of work and living in a different country to my girlfriend), these little guys would be pretty handy. I’m thinking about getting one of those very light laptops for the same reason, rather than my current unwieldy 17″ one which is great to have at home but a nightmare to take anywhere.
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Those little netbooks are cool for travel, Dan. Would love one of those little Acers.
I have a big notebook that I travel with, affectionately called my Lapbrick.
I think the price of the Kindle is going to come down a lot in the next year, as far as I can tell people think they’re cool but I don’t know ANYONE who has actually bought one, mainly due to the prohibitive price.
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I know a couple of people who have them, and they love them, mostly for the things no one has mentioned here — adustible font size (and style, I believe), the fact that you can store RSS feeds on them (keep up with your blogs, etc.) and follow the feeds “on the road”.
This is kinda long, but this is what my friend had to say about his…
“IMHO, the Amazon Kindle is on par with Google Earth in terms of killer
technology. My wife got me one for my birthday after I made many yearning
sorts of lustful noises about the Kindle. And, now that I’ve used it for
over a month, the Kindle is even better than I had thought it would be.
I knew I could never read a book on a computer screen. However, the Kindle
uses a new “electronic ink” technology. WAY cool. It is extraordinarily
similar to reading a paper book. Illustrations are not great… I wouldn’t
want to read something with a lot of diagrams, but for pure text, it’s
great.
There are many great features of the Kindle. My eyes tend to get tired at
the end of the day, and smaller type is hard to read. A click on the Kindle
allows me to instantly change the font size. WAY cool.
Wireless: the Kindle is hooked up to the Sprint Whispernet (I think it’s
Sprint); said service is included in the purchase price. It’s continuously
available just about anywhere you get a cell signal. You can launch a basic
web browser; again, illustrations can be a pain, but you can look up stuff
on wikipedia and it generally looks great.
Browse amazon for a book you want; find one and you can download a sample
chapter… decide to buy and and 90 seconds later you have the entire book
downloaded into your Kindle. Break your Kindle and replace it – and you can
restore everything you have ever downloaded from Amazon into your
replacement Kindle.
Click on a line while you’re reading and you’ll get an option to lookup key
words in the online Oxford Dictionary. You can highlight text and make
notes using the full QWERTY keyboard.
There’s more… if anybody wants more info please feel free to write me. I
could carry on and on, since I LOVE it. So far I’ve read three complete
books (oh, you can download even new releases for $10…), and have uploaded
even my own Word document so it’s available on my Kindle. Oh, yeah, it will
play audio books as well… I’m listening to one driving too and from work.
I read probably a couple dozen books per year, as I have since I was about
ten years old. I love books, and I love the Kindle. The idea of carrying
around my complete library in this little device is just insane. ”
I have *another* friend whose soon to be ex-wife has been loading all kinds of books to her Kindle, which is paid for from *his* account, so there’s all kinds of issues here… LOL
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RE the netbooks, I’ve been lusting after one of *those* — the Toshiba has a great size screen — the Acer/Asus ones have relatively small screens, from 8.9″ to 10″ which seem to be standard for most.
The Toshiba had me until it mentioned that there’s no dial-up modem — don’t know when I’ll be able to have a place of my own, so I can get DSL.
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I wrote about my desired ebook reader on my book nook (here). I got some good feedback in the comments about my concerns over the fact that Amazon seems to want to sell you a whole bunch of free pdf for $10 each.
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I’m not against the technology simply because I don’t like technology. I happen to like paper books far more than the concept of an electronic version of the book. Even if I am travelling, I like the idea of a paper version of a book better than the idea of an electronic version.
I often finish a book while on the road and then leave it for someone else to read… someone who likely can’t afford the cost of a meal, let alone a book, let alone a Kindle.
I can hand my book to a friend or receive a book from a friend and feel a connection to that person… If I buy a used copy of a book or one from an antiquarian book shop, I can feel a connection to someone long dead… Can’t do that with an electronic “book”… While I appreciate that there are things about electronic books, no matter what, it will not replace the paper book….
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nah, the iPhone is what you want – then you can download books either for free or for about a $ each and read them on the screen. You can change the font style and size and it remembers which page you were on when you last closed it and reopens at that point next time. Its brilliant when you’re travelling and don’t have room for a big book.
But for a cosy time on your own sofa, I still prefer an actual book.
Kindle is a complete waste of time and money and will be obsolete by the end of next year if it isn’t already.
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dont have kindle, but as u may know i do want one. its the price that’s the setback…i still can get over how much they want for one. ridiculous!!
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“Would love one of those little Acers.”
Oh no, Beth, I’ve seen one ‘in action’ and it’s crap. The keyboard is too small to type comfortably and it doesn’t have a CD/DVD thingy. The Toshiba has a 12″ widescreen, full-size keyboard, CD/DVD, is ultra thin and weighs less than a kilo (1.72 pounds). Plus it’s GORGEOUS. They have one at the Corte Inglés (dept store) here and I often go and visit it.
As Dan says, having a 17″ widescreen laptop at home is great, but it isn’t exactly ‘portable’ in the sense of easily carrying it around with you.
Isn’t the iPhone screen too small to read comfortably, truce?
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I watched a show not that long ago all about what would happen on earth if people all just suddenly disappeared. The way things disintegrate is very interesting.
What I did not know, and what made me pause for thought long and hard was the part of the documentary that talked about how “secure” electronic storage is. It actually is not secure, and even the information encoded on a CD or DVD will degrade over time. Anyone who has had the lovely experience of a hard drive crash has some experience of what happens to the files stored on it after the crash. I had many photos that are gone now because our hard drive crashed and I had not backed them up to disk. Damn it.
How many people have vinyl records they can’t play because they have no turntable? Ever tried to watch a really old video? We had to discard a whole pile of them when the technology for reading those videos became obsolete. And even with our old VCR, some of them were so deteriorated they would not play. In 300 years, will we still have the technology to “read” electronic books, even if they haven’t degraded?
Acid free paper will last a very long time when stored under the proper humidity and temperature conditions — several hundred years. Will our electronic files last a similar amount of time?
What is the environmental impact of the batteries that run the kindle, if you are concerned about that. I think recycling paper is probably more environmentally friendly. There are pros and cons on both sides of the equation.
If I was doing a lot of traveling, I would probably want one of the electronic books, just because of the weight and space they save. But for permanent storage? Books every time.
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hmh, good points – you have to be much more active in preserving electronic information than paper information. The good news is that the libraries are on to this now, and have huge programmes to archive all this electronic data. It’s possible to be this active about electronic data because unlike paper and ink, it’s essentially free to duplicate it. Every book that was ever written could in principle be stored digitally at just about every library on the planet, so even if one or several of the files degraded, they’d just to have to get a copy (at almost no cost) of one of the non-degraded versions from another one of the libraries. Another bonus about doing this would be that you could get a copy of every book that was ever written at any library (or over the internet).
az, I’m kind of tempted by one of those Sony Vaio TT or similar, so cool looking and very thin/light, but the price tag… ouch.
http://vaio.sony.co.uk/view/ShowProductCategory.action?site=voe_en_GB_cons&category=VN+TT+Series#sc2pair1
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Well, I just had a client here for a massage and she has a kindle and the verdict from her is “I love it!” It saves her money. It saves her hassles. She is a night worker, and getting to the library in a timely fashion is difficult. It is a wonderful thing for traveling too, she says. Very convenient, wherever you are you can download a book.
She showed me the device, it is truly light, VERY easy to read. I can see that the “electronic eyestrain” problem might possibly be completely eliminated by the way this screen is. You cannot read in the dark, though, because it is not backlit. She and her partner have shared this kindle, and they are going to buy another one because there are lots of times they both want to use it at the same time.
This tells me that this is probably a VERY good gadget for a reader to have, since my client is not made of money or impractical in her purchases.
Dan the samovar, thanks for that clarification of electronic storage and degradation. I have never been clear on that. As long as the technological system was still working, it would be a very efficient way to have lots of data available to lots of people with no wasted space, paper. Imagine the savings if you didn’t have to have that huge warehouse to shelter all those paper books from the rain. I hadn’t really thought about that aspect.
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I love the feel of a book in my hands. But, my hands are getting old, and have lousy circulation — gripping a book (to hold it open and up, among other things) for longer than an hour can become very painful, and I have to take a break. Sometimes I go back to the book, sometimes I don’t.
Also, trees are a resource; new trees are used for acid free paper. Recycled paper (which has been in use for decades, not just in these “green” times) have acid from the processing and reprocessing of the fibers. Just sayin’.
From travel I would use a Kindle (or the Sony reader, about $100 cheaper), and keep the book collection home. BUT, love the pass it on idea, Anneke! Are you a member of a Bookcrossing chapter?
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hmh, the electronic storage thing relies on people being proactive about keeping the data up to date, and checking for errors and degradation and stuff, so it is a slight worry. In the past that’s been a problem because of the relatively high cost of storage, but these days you get get hundreds of gigabytes for virtually nothing (heck, WordPress gives you something like 7 or 9 gigabytes for free! and a gigabyte can probably keep 500-1000 books if they’re just saved as text without pictures or anything).
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Wow, what a lot of good feedback and info here! Still not convinced enough to start coveting one, though. I think that this would come under the heading of ‘luxury item’, as opposed to ‘something that I seriously feel I can’t live without!!!’. 😉
Just as well, really.
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DEFINITELY a luxury item; still, if I had the cash, and was going on a trip, you could follow your emails, blogs, the news and bring a bunch of books along, besides.
RE: storage — you could have stored a novel or two even on one of the old 3.5″ floppies, without pictures, for that matter. But a Kindle/Sony Reader should be a little more robust than one of those…
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I have one Az. I love it. As far as the screen goes, it really is like reading a newspaper or book. Ink like. It’s wonderful. There are also many books available for download free. If you are reading something and a word comes up that you don’t know you can click it and you will be given the definition. You can bookmark or look up a passage that you read. You can store hundreds of books in it. And within seconds download your book of choice, anywhere–anytime without internet connection. It’s amazing.
And if you happen to lose your Kindle, Amazon has your books stored for you so you can retrieve them without purchasing them all over again. It’s a hefty sticker price but just like any other device these days, give it time, it’ll come down.
🙂
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