The Kindle 2: The Devil's Money-Sucking Time Sink

My wife got it a couple of months ago. I ignored it, told her to send it back.

"Let's do without these damn gadgets." - Dylan Thomas

After a month of arguing about it I tried it out. One day, they will pry it from my cold dead fingers. If you like to read, and especially if you travel a lot, this is the alpha and omega, the best electronic device ever created, your personal deliverance from an idiot-world of info-junk and push-content.

Your $359 gets you this (pencil not included):

Actually, the cover is an extra $30. You can economize and not get the cover, but without a cover you might as well get out a ball-peen hammer and wreck the thing now. Survivability is not its strong suit.

Positives

• The display is easy-to-read, even in bright sunlight. Text size is adjustable.
• Built-in wi-fi allows you to quickly download a huge selection of books, magazines, and newspapers, no matter where you are (unless you live in some remote place, like, say, Alaska).
• You can e-mail pdf or word processing docs to yourself and read them on the Kindle.
• Nice selection of newspapers. Getting on the plane in Albuquerque I realized I didn't have anything to read. $0.75 later I had Financial Times and was good to go. You can't get it for any price at most airports. Could've had the New York Times (also frequently unavailable) or the Times Literary Supplement if I'd preferred.
• Having dropped around $400 on the device, you save maybe $10 per book. Some newspapers are cheaper. My Kindle 2 has about paid for itself in three months.
• Battery lasts about a week at a time for me (I usually turn off wi-fi). Recharges pretty fast.
• Great clipping function lets you flag text and then (using the USB cable) transfer it to your desktop. Most newspapers let you clip entire articles with a mouse click.
• Ergonomics are outstanding. They say the goal was to have the thing 'disappear' as you read it, and they came pretty close to achieving that.
• Holds around 1,500 books. You can literally take your library with you.
• Text is searchable. Works great.
• Bottom line: you never have to sit around doing nothing again. Bus rides, train rides, airport waiting lines, taxi rides, shuttle buses, airport lounges, corporate waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, are all now just places to read. Read anything you want, when you want, with no fuss or hassle, except for maybe in the shower.

Negatives

• The Kindle store has "more than 300,000 books." Most of which are self-help tomes, Project Gutenberg stuff from the 19th century (many of these are free, however), and weird conservative political screeds (this thing is the Kindle #1 seller, and this is #3). Good books are harder to get. Here are some books I thought I'd like to read that are NOT available on Kindle:

1. The Letters of E.B. White
2. Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers
3. Thomas Boswell's Cracking the Show
4. John Updike's More Matter: Essays and Criticism
5. Heinrich Boll's The Clown
6. Vonnegut's Mother Night

And so it goes. To continue my complaints:

• Can't read it in the dark unless you buy the $20 clip-on light.
• Books almost always suffer typos in the conversion process. It's usually not too bad, but expect 10x or 20x the typos of a regular book or newspaper.
• Graphics processing is dodgy - some graphics come through nicely, others don't. This is fixable, and as the device evolves the problems will probably go away, maybe just through software upgrades. This fellow couldn't wait and has created a Manga hack:

• The Kindle runs on Java and Linux, so you guys could probably turn it into a satellite control platform if you wanted to.
• Sixteen shades of gray, but no color - get the Hiroshige anthology in hardcopy.
• Tables? Bwah hah hah hah! Forget it. If it's not encoded as a graphic, it's total effing mess.
• While the clippings function is convenient, the clippings file omits paragraph returns or linefeeds or whatever they're called nowadays. This means that if you want to clip and use an article you have to reformat it by hand (or find a conversion protocol that I haven't found yet). That sucks.
• As I said, survivability is not its strong suit. Don't drop it. Don't spill anything on it. Don't shake it. Don't yell at it. If you take it to the beach, you're on your own.

But the biggest downside of the Kindle 2 is that it's too good. Now that you never have to waste another minute, you need to be a little careful about reading all the time, blowing $10-$20-$30 a day on books, then losing your job and being evicted because you can't make rent. Seriously, if you like to read, it's like meth that doesn't ruin your teeth.

And I mean that in a good way.