On Kindle Critiques…
Internet, my name is Felix and I have a problem. I can’t stop blogging about the Kindle. Sue me.
Anyhyoo, I’ve noticed that a lot of the complaints about the Kindle seem a little like “And also? It doesn’t cook me breakfast when I wake up in the morning. WTF??!1!1!!” Most of the A-List tech bloggers are well documented in their hatred of it for what seem like really odd problems to me. The real fundamental problem with the Kindle is that it makes it very difficult to get free content onto it. Although, I did read that Amazon had an experimental PDF converter that you would try it’s darnedest to get you your content back on the reader in a decent format - that’s still a long, long ways away from good. Oh, and you can also convert your pdfs to DRM free .mobi files with a desktop app, still not perfect, granted but you know. Hopefully it’s a software update away from changing - I actually haven’t read anything about software updates to the device and how they will take place. Hopefully it works well and easily, iPhone style and not horrendously a la Treo’s.
Ok, so… I rambled, but I recently came across this ars technica review of the Kindle which sounds a touch loony to me. Let’s see, shall we?
In short, electronic “books” are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the “book,” then it has missed the mark by a mile.
Well, that’s a good executive summary. Let’s dig in. He talks about how awesome the typography of some books are and how they were meant to be looked at as a two page spread and everything about them has been thoughtfully arranged. With this I don’t disagree - some books and magazines are beautifully laid out and the subtle art of typography perfectly applied. Viewing old issues of Ray Gun might lose something in the translation… Is that the majority out there? Hellz no. Heeeellllz, no. Most of them at best pick a font, tell it to you in the first couple pages and maybe have a little graphic between the chapters. If you’re lucky.
So… why does he say “I firmly believe that the term “e-book” is an unfortunate misnomer and that the newly launched Kindle’s pretentious positioning as a modern reinvention of the book is just hype and hyperbole.”?
By giving us the full expanse of the facing-page format in an easily portable, low-power, electronic medium like E Ink, companies like Amazon and Sony could help bring about a renaissance of typography. Books could afford to be beautiful again (or, at least considerably less ugly), instead of just being low-margin, disposable objects of textual consumption.
Uh.. because they only show one page at a time?? That’s his beef and why e-book’s are crap? And apparently, E-books are not alone in their non-bookishiness, they are joined by other… books?
And if you take some time to compare and contrast a work like this with a typographic trainwreck like D.C. Greetham’s Textual Scholarship: an Introduction, then you’ll come to appreciate the difference between a “book” and “a stack of printed documents bound together on one side.”
So… E-books aren’t books. Neither are most books in general that don’t live up to the standard set by Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style which I suspect is like 99% of every book out there. That is genuinely a crazy, crazy complaint to hold against the Kindle.
What else has he got to say about the pretentious hyperbole of the Kindle?
The other place where the e-book + reader combination falls woefully short of a traditional book is in its fundamental lack of interactivity. Yes, you read that right—electronic documents are typically less interactive than their paper counterparts. Why? Because you can’t easily mark them up with underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes.
Ok. Sort of a valid complaint. Two issues. First, most people most of the time don’t mark up the books they get. Text books are different, but ok, still it’d be nice. Oh wait, yeah, you can annotate the Kindle. You can take notes in it, you can highlight text, you can export all the notes and passages you’ve clipped, you can bookmark things, you can use the built in dictionary oh and you can search through the text of a specific book or your entire library (the size of which has been the crazy subject of complaint from another blogger - can you believe it? They complained that the Kindle’s storage space was too big??). So, uh, what is he talking about?
Right now, the iRex Iliad 2 is the only e-book reader that I’m aware of that gives readers the ability to mark up electronic books via a touchscreen and a stylus.
Oh. So it doesn’t count unless it’s a touch screen? Despite having more and what I believe will prove to be genuinely useful functionality that you could never have in a paper book? How many times have I wished I could search for a passage in a book? Many, let me tell you.
So, basically his problem is two fold. He wants to double the size of the device so you can see two pages at a time. This will help whatever tiny fraction of books that need to be viewed that way for best effect. It will also make it heavier and generally harder to hold. Maybe they can make it so that you have to be constantly holding the two sides open lest they close on you, because I love that. They should make it so that if it you place it on a flat surface and don’t hold it open it closes automatically. They should also make it so that if it’s the next ice age comes and you need to burn something to stay warm, you can throw the Kindle on the fireplace and have it burn brightly. Awesome, please don’t listen to him Amazon.
And it’s no good to him unless it’s a touch screen, no other interface will do. I mean, ok, I would love to be able to have a touch screen interface for some of that functionality, but as a requirement to even be able to call itself an E-book? Looooneeey.
Interestingly, most of the blogging I’ve read of non A-List tech bloggers who actually have gotten a Kindle have been pretty uniformly positive. Take this one from Gamers with Jobs - it’s the most in depth review I’ve come across so far and is quite good - arguably proving my point that it seems odd for people to so vehemently argue ergonomics without ever actually touching the device or even seeing it. Granted owner reviews are a self-selecting group, but it’s interesting none the less and the Kindle’s are now indefinitely sold out (their back in stock date having moved from Dec 6 to Dec 17 to now a “we’ll email you when we know” date) - so it seems as though they are moving briskly.
I think the Kindle is a good start. Certainly not perfect and some questionable decisions were made. Still, the Whispernet is damn cool. I wonder if they will start leveraging that into more wireless products in other niches. Music, for instance. They’re already selling DRM free MP3’s, why not make an MP3 player with free wireless connection to Amazon’s music store? For me, at this point there isn’t enough content that I want to rationalize getting one - if they announced that all of Wrox and O’reilly’s books would be available that’d probably be enough to throw me over. Compressing all these paper books I’ve got down to a 10oz device would do my apartment wonders and make my wife rapturously happy. Hopefully, soon.
