Dear Amazon, Here's Your Kindle Back

The Kindle, along with all the accessories that come in the box.

The Kindle won't be replacing books anytime soon.

Photo by Jurek Durczak. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

As a huge nerd, a lover of all things small and electronic, and an avid reader, I was mesmerized by the Amazon Kindle when it was first announced. I wanted one pretty badly, but I just wasn't sure if I was ready to lay down $400 on the device. As it turned out, the decision was made for me, because the Kindle went into back order for quite some time.

Amazon has recently fixed the production problems that kept the Kindle on seemingly permanent back order. Not only is getting the Kindle now a simple matter of waiting a few days, but they managed to drop the price by $40. I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and ordered my Kindle. What follows are my thoughts of the state of the Kindle and a log of my experiences with the device, a review, if you will.

Some Books Just Aren't Made For the Small Screen

I'm a computer programmer and systems architect. My bookshelf is full of books to teach me how to code in a multitude of languages, best practice guides from Ajax to Zope, books about design patterns, books about anti-patterns, books about how to run Windows / Linux / Mac OS, and on and on they go. I thought that the Kindle would be perfect for replacing all these giant, heavy books in one little 10 ounce package. I could basically hold an unlimited number of books in the thing, and I could bookmark, highlight, annotate, and search to my heart's content. I couldn't wait for the day when I could type "database" into my Kindle and get a list of all the places where databases are discussed in my books. Halle - freaking - lujah.

Unfortunately, there's something that I didn't anticipate. See, all those books have one thing in common. They're all chock-full of flow charts, diagrams, graphs, illustrations, and code listings. Many times, there are several pictures in a row comparing and contrasting certain aspects of the technology in question. The Kindle's screen, you see, is barely big enough to show one of these diagrams, forget showing multiple diagrams at once. Sometimes the diagrams have to be shrunk down so small they're barely legible. This leaves the reader with the unenviable task of having to switch the Kindle's pages back and forth several times to see the entire set of illustrations. With the page flipping operation being as slow as it is, this gets very old, very quickly.

Don't even think about code listings. Code listings are the worst. I suppose that the Kindle interprets code listings as text, because if they were left as images they'd have to be shrunk down too far to read. Unfortunately, leaving them as text doesn't help matters much. The Kindle doesn't know a code snippet from a regular paragraph, so code is often not indented properly, code lines wrap when they shouldn't, and the code listing can stretch on for pages and pages. There's just no way to get out of these listings what the authors intended on the Kindle's screen.

So Tech Books Are Out, But Novels Are Cool, Right?

I did try to read a few novels with the Kindle, and I have to say that I really enjoyed that. I didn't suffer that strange feeling of claustrophobia that I got while trying to read the chart heavy technical books. Reading regular novels was quite the pleasant experience. The screen is very nice and the text font and spacing couldn't be easier on the eyes. The slow page turning speed wasn't an issue, because after reading just a few pages you really get a feel for the speed of the device and unconsciously hit the next page button in time to finish the page your on before moving to the next. It's quite an experience, actually.

I have a problem here, though. You see, I've already got a queue of about 80 old-school, paper format novels that I haven't yet read. Amazon isn't just going to magically convert all of those into Kindle format for me. I can't send them back to the publisher in exchange for an e-book version (although that would be pretty awesome). I'm certainly not going to buy them again in another format. Even if I did decide to buy them again, most of the novels I have or want aren't yet available in Kindle editions. There are tons and tons of books available for the Kindle, just not the ones I read. The strange thing about that is that I tend to read pretty popular Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors. Not much in the way of obscure titles there. Oh well.

I Love You Man. You Can't Have My Kindle.

I tend to lend books out to friends and co-workers. I don't really care if I ever see those books again, because I almost never read them twice. Not only do I trade books with friends, but I am part of an online book trading community called BookMooch. For every book that I send to someone else on the site, I gain the ability to request one book from another user. Well, you certainly can't do that with the Kindle. Once you buy a book, it's yours, DRM and all. There's no transferring the book to another user, or loaning that book out. That book is yours until the end of time, whether you want it or not.

*tap tap tap* Is This Thing On?

So, Amazon has this ingenious method of getting content to your Kindle, they use a cellular network (called Whispernet) to transmit data and files. They've implemented a special front-end of their popular store right on the Kindle, so you can shop for a book at any time, any where, as long as you're in cell phone range. Well, that's the idea anyway. I never actually got that part to work. I could use the online store just fine, but I simply could not get a book that I had purchased to load onto the Kindle over the wireless network. I had to plug the device into my USB port every single time. I honestly don't know why this was happening. I'm sure there was probably a fairly easy fix for this, but I'd pretty much had enough of the Kindle by this point.

It Wasn't All Bad

Despite my complaining, I actually do like the device. It is well designed, reading on it is easy, it's light, and if Whispernet worked, it would be a fabulous way to get new books. However, the thing is still too expensive to justify owning one. Some of these problems will need to be fixed before I hop back into bed with the Kindle. Either they need a way for me to trade in paper books for Kindle versions, they need to enlarge the screen for a more friendly experience reading technical books, or they need to significantly drop the price. Any of those things will probably get me to reconsider buying another Kindle.

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