Using a Kindle: Some First Impressions

[This is one of what will no doubt become a series on my experiences in using a Kindle 2. It’s not a drum I want to beat often — don’t want it to become one of those “I have X but you don’t, haha!” gloatfests. But it might be useful for people on the fence about the whole e-book deal.]

Frequent RAMH commenter DarcKnyt wondered recently over at his place: What are the pros and cons of e-readers? He asked for comments particularly from people who’ve used them. I probably gave him way more that he wanted/needed — it would’ve made for a long post here, and that’s saying something.

Here’s the bottom line, for me:

In general, I think the transition to e-books will resemble any other transition to a new/different technology. It will come with inconveniences and drawbacks… but ultimately people will learn to live with them (or the tech will advance to the point where they no longer apply), for the sake of the NEW conveniences and features they couldn’t even have faked the old way. (No doubt, when cavemen first started to light fires at night, a subset of them swaggered around, sniffed haughtily, and hitched up their fur loincloths, insisting that things were better when we kept watch by moonlight and the stars — and we sure didn’t have to keep getting up to dump another log on the moon every time the previous one burned down! And you couldn’t drop the moon in a river and put it out! It gave everything a much sleeker, more romantic look, than fire ever could! The moon didn’t threaten to get out of control and burn down the whole damn forest! Etc.)

(If you’d like to see the full thing, which includes more details of my experience so far, it’s resting comfortably over across the Web, at Darc’s place.)

I’ve since thought of a few other things I might have mentioned:

First, I may never get used to not being able to quickly flip forward or back. The “quickly” is the key word there: clicking the Next Page or Prev Page buttons is easy enough, after all. But it takes a discernible moment to do so for each click. If you’d like to see about how close you are to the end of a chapter or section, for example, you can’t zip through the pages looking for the telltale whitespace gap; it’s less a zip than it is a click… click… click…

Speaking of clicks, you’ve gotta watch carefully what you’re doing as you browse the Amazon store.

A couple of weeks ago, while researching my What’s in a Song: Simple Gifts posts, I searched for Kindle books using simple gifts as a keyword. So I’ve got this sort of scrolling list of titles to look at, and I can see more about any one just by clicking on it. At which point, the scrolling list is replaced by a full-screen page of details — including the Buy button, should you decide to make a purchase. Here’s a sample (cribbed from the NPR site):

One problem: the Buy button is selected by default.

Now, you can scroll up and down in the screen to highlight (select) other things. For instance, in the above screen capture, you can go down to the phrase 16 Customer Reviews, click on it, and read those 16 reviews right there. But the little gizmo you use to scroll up and down from one hot spot to another is a modified sort of joystick, called the “5-way button”: you can push it left, right, up, or down… or click it to cause the currently selected hotspot to be activated.

Right: I accidentally bought a copy of a book called Simple Gifts, by one Lori Copeland. (Kindle price: $9.99. Amazon price (“paperback bargain”): $5.60. New from an Amazon seller for… one cent.) Here’s the start of the product description:

Can anything else go wrong? Marlene Queens goes home to Parness Springs, Missouri, to put her late Aunt Beth’s house on the market and settle the estate. But once she’s back home, Marlene suddenly finds herself in over her head…

I might actually end up reading this, and I’m sure it’s a good book (all eight of its current reviewers say so, and Lori Copeland supposedly has sold millions of books, although I wasn’t familiar with her name). You can, they say, cancel an order even once it’s downloaded. (I’m awaiting a reply from Amazon on this.) So I can’t say I’m going to chalk this up as ultimately unsatisfying.

But it’s something to be aware of.

Update, 2010-07-21: I just received notification that the $9.99 purchase price for that accidental Simple Gifts purchase had been refunded, and the book de-activated. It was as simple as clicking a “Contact Us” button on the Kindle Support page, and requesting a refund. (As an aside, this justifies — to my way of thinking, anyway — the purchase of  some other book which I do want. Ha.)

The last things I wanted to mention here have to do with deciding which books to download, vs. buying in traditional form. Two considerations:

• At last count, Amazon offered about 650,000 books in Kindle editions — with more every day. (This is probably misleading. It seems, for example, that among them might be over 100 different editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — each a “different” book.) But it does surprise me how many books have not yet been Kindleized. As I understand it, this is partly attributable to marketing concerns by publishers and authors, who don’t want Kindle sales to cut into “real” book sales. Technological barriers may exist, too, particularly for older/out-of-print books which have never been digitized. Still: some disappointing holes in the catalog.
• The Missus and I have many favorite book series in common: Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels; Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Pendergast thrillers; and so on. If I buy a Kindle version of any of those books, she’s unlikely to read it. Worse, in some ways — if I discover some other book she might like, well, all I can do is tell her about it. I can’t just add it to her stack. (Even if she eventually owned her own Kindle, you can’t share books between them unless they’re registered to the same Amazon account.)

More down the road later.