Kindle-ing 2

I have now read several different books on my Kindle and I have to say that I like it. I know a lot of people are saying that you lose the tactile feedback, the satisfaction, the overall experience of reading when you use an electronic reader. To an extent, they are correct. You don't feel the cover; you don't turn the page; you can't smell the ink, or the cover or the paper, all of those things are missing.

Also missing, however, is the weight, the arm cramps, the skipped pages, fumbling to get just one page to turn, the bulk, the thumb cramps, and all the other physical things that make reading uncomfortable. To be fair, I am comparing to a 800+ page hard-bound book, a smaller paperback isn't quite as bad.

OK, those are the bad things. The loss of the physical presence of the book. Now on to the things I liked about the Kindle and the things I didn't like.

The Kindle's display is very good. I had no more eyestrain reading on the Kindle than I do with a real book. The whole "staring at a screen" thing simply is not an issue. Being able to adjust the font size is nice, especially if you are a bit more experienced at life than others, like me, and if your are more than a little tired, like when you're on the back end of a 12 hours international flight like I was.

The page turning mechanism is OK, not great, and not horrible. The big button on both sides of the Kindle advance the page, and the little button turns pages back. It takes a bit to get used to the buttons for two reasons. First, I had a tendency to use the big button on the right to advance, and when I went too far, I tried to use the big button on the left to go back. This seems more intuitive to me, at least that was my initial thought.

The second reason was that you have to place your hands on the device in the right spot to be able to advance pages. This seemed a bit awkward at first. After using it for a while though, it is apparent that the buttons work well and although each individual is going to want the buttons in a different place, Amazon did as well as can be expected with the button placement. And this is where the logic of the big advance buttons on both sides comes in. You can hold the Kindle with either hand and still easily change pages. You don't have to reach across the device if you are holding it with your left hand. Also, I would often use the hand that I wasn't using to hold the Kindle to advance the page, much like you would with a real book. The cool thing was that I could do that no matter which hand I held the "book" with.

I did run into trouble a few times with accidentally holding down the advance button when I went to lay the Kindle down to answer a phone, or whatever. I'd pick the book back up, and I had no idea what page I was on. I had to thumb back a number of pages, sometimes 10 or more, to find where I was at.

This leads to another drawback of electronic readers. You have no real sense of where you are in a book. With a real book, you can see that you are 1/3rd the way through easily. With a Kindle, they give you a display that shows a strange number system that indicates what line your are on, or something like that, and a percentage. You have to physically look at the percentage and notice it to tell where you are. With a real book, it's done more by feel. This is a small thing overall though. There is definitely an advantage too because as long as you don't fat-finger the advance button like I did, you'll never lose your place because the book closed accidentally or you forgot to put your bookmark in place. The Kindle always remembers, even if you switch to a different book for a while.

I did learn fairly quickly how to hold the device so that it was both comfortable and in an easy position to read. There are several ways I found to hold it that worked well for me. I read in bed both on my side and on my back. I read in my recliner (a lot). I read on the airplane. I didn't have any real difficulties getting comfortable.

The Kindle screen is about the same size as a standard paperback page. I found that I preferred to use a smaller font even if I did have to use my reading glasses. It made it so I didn't have to turn the page as often. And this is the one big advantage a book has over the Kindle. With a book, you only need to turn a page once for every two pages you read. With a Kindle, you have to advance the page once for every page you read. The Kindle makes this fast and easy -- faster than turning a real page -- but this is still a disadvantage and one that won't be fixed any time soon.

OK, so there is the physical stuff. Now lets move one to the important thing, the book -- the story. Amazingly, the story was really good and I completely ignored the fact that I was not reading in a printed book. It was just a story that I was reading. The story is the real product here, not the presentation method. The Kindle did not make the story any better, or any worse than it would have been in a printed book. I finished the book completely satisfied -- well, I did miss that satisfying "thunk" when I closed the book for the last time, I will admit to that. But, that's OK.

I do have an opinion about the whole "experience" discussion. People learn to like things because of the good experiences they have with them. What people have to understand is that the good experience from reading comes from the story, not the book. They associate the physical book with that good experience and so are disturbed by the idea that they're not reading a book anymore, they're reading on a device. My opinion is: get over it. Read the story, love the story. You might find that you start to get all warm and fuzzy every time you look at your Kindle. I do.