Amazon Kindle Review: Igniting Interest in E-Books?

A Few Quibbles

Sometimes the Kindle was slow, as the device lagged behind my button presses. In those cases I'd overshoot the menu or options entirely. Still more times I encountered a lag or a flickering fade-in effect as I transitioned among menus and changed pages. The lag wasn't so onerous that I couldn't use the device, but it was annoying--and it became very pronounced when I tried to virtually flip ahead several pages at a time.

The screen has a gray, indistinct quality that resembles the appearance of newspaper. The monochrome screen supports four levels of grayscale. I had no issues reading the display under a multitude of circumstances, including in bright lighting and while riding a Long Island Railroad train. Since the display lacks a backlight, however, the surface wasn't readable in dim lighting.

The text was mostly clear, though a few characters had jaggies. A button on the keyboard lets you switch among six different font sizes. One important note for those who require large-print text: The biggest size is actually larger than the text I saw in a large-print book I had on hand.

The navigation software is fairly straightforward, but occasionally it doesn't do what you'd expect. For example, the Home screen shows you the user guide and your content. You can sort that content by books or periodicals, or by most recent, the title, or the author. You can't search on these parameters, which is annoying if you're hunting for Harry Potter books but not a set of critical essays on Harry Potter.

Another glitch: After I made a purchase, I could not return to the page I'd last been browsing--incredibly irritating when I was in the midst of 17 pages of search results.

Downloading E-Books

Shopping for e-books via the Kindle store is similar to being on the Amazon site. Books take less than a minute to download, and their prices vary; new releases and New York Times bestsellers cost $10. The Kindle store offered 90,000 titles at launch.

You can browse or search for book, magazine, newspaper, or blog content at the Kindle store. When you find something you like, select the item to see further details, including a description, the sales ranking, customer reviews, the print length, other titles that customers bought, and the list price for the paper version of the book. As I noted earlier, you can't refine your searches; even more frustrating is the fact that you can't limit your search to items in the category you're browsing.

Another frustration: Kindle provides an impressive collection, but it's still not comprehensive. For example, I could find travel guides for plenty of locations, but not a single guide for Tokyo. That's too bad, since a device like Kindle could be a godsend to tourists: Who wants to schlep bulky guidebooks around?

Once you find a title you want, you click on Buy and the e-book downloads to your device automatically. You can continue shopping or read other content already on your Kindle. If you purchase something by accident, you can cancel your order immediately.

If you're browsing Amazon on your PC, you can also initiate your purchase there and send the e-book to your Kindle: Amazon clearly shows when it has a Kindle version of a book for sale. You could also have the title sent to your PC and then transfer it to your Kindle via a USB connection. Unfortunately, as of yet Amazon offers no special deals for buying a physical book and an e-book together.

While an e-book file can reside on both your PC and your Kindle, you can't read it on your PC. You can't send an e-book to someone else, either; they have to buy their own copy. Though Amazon doesn't limit the number of copies, the title is tied to your Kindle device.

Amazon archives your purchases on its servers. If you lose or delete an e-book, you can download it again. That's nice forethought--invariably, Kindles will get lost or broken, or you simply may need to delete something on the fly to make room for an eleventh-hour book purchase you made just before your next flight.

While you're reading a book, you can look up words in the built-in dictionary, highlight a passage and store it locally or send it to someone, and annotate passages. The last page you read automatically becomes a bookmark--the part of the text that appears when you return to that title.

Beyond Books

The Kindle's Web browser is handy for quick news, weather, or Wikipedia lookups. Not as useful is the Kindle's stab at daily relevance with its newspaper and blog delivery, in which Amazon charges you for services available for free via a Web browser.

Granted, once you subscribe, the company delivers the daily blog content to the device so you can read it on the go (or in the air), but the arrangement still feels like nickel-and-diming of customers.

You can subscribe to 11 newspapers, 308 blogs, and a handful of magazines. Choices include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Time, Fortune, the Atlantic Monthly, Le Monde, and Slate. Amazon delivers the content to your Kindle so you can read it on the go. By contrast, Sony's Reader provides blogs and RSS feeds for free.

Every Kindle comes with a customizable e-mail address, which allows you to e-mail Microsoft Word, plain-text, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PND, and GMP files--for 10 cents a pop. You can't read files directly from the SD Card, as they need to be converted to a Kindle-friendly format. I lament the lack of Adobe PDF and direct file support--those features would have been a real boon to users, and they're already available on Sony's Reader.

One last plus: Kindle can also play audio books from Audible.com; competing e-book readers don't have this option.