Amazon's Kindle a minor report

After nearly 1.5 years since the original Kindle was released, version 2 came out late last month and I plunged and got myself one of those. The device like its predecessor uses E-Ink -- A technology that is radically different from current LCD or CRT displays. Basically the display is a dull plastic like surface that has embedded in it millions of spherical bubbles. Each bubble has some colored particles (black and white to make this easy) and the two particles have opposite charges. The top and bottom of the plastic has circuitry that can induce a charge. So if you want to make the sphere look a certain color, you charge the circuit with a charge that will attract the color particles you want to the top. By doing this to each sphere (each represents a pixel), you have a page typeset with what you want. Also unlike regular displays, this display is not a light source... the reason your eyes smart at the end of a long work day in front of your computer.

There are a handful of different e-ink readers in the market and some precede the first generation Kindle. What sets them apart from the Kindle is mainly the content and access to it. Amazon setup the Kindle with a Sprint 3G chip built into the device. So you can pretty much buy an e-book from anywhere (without a computer) as long as you have Sprint coverage in your area. The cellular charge is hidden from you and as far as you are concerned you don't deal with Sprint. You bought the device from Amazon and you buy books from Amazon. Thats pretty much it-- Bingo! the first set of devices were sold out in 4 hours and took many months to come back in stock. One cannot be sure if this is due to the huge success of the device or because Amazon created an artificial shortage of Kindles. Either way, the orignal Kindle evoked a lot of passion among a lot of book readers. Almost everybody loved the e-ink display and almost everybody hated the 80s retro look that the Kindle sported. But function usurped form and people kept buying. Oprah endorsed the Kindle in own of her shows sometime late 2008 and sales practically exploded.

There were several things that were still problematic with the E-Ink technology. For one the display was slow, as a matter of fact it was so slow that the Kindle could not give you a cursor that could be moved by you across the screen to position on a word (for dictionary lookup or menu selection). Instead they had to create a LCD strip to the right of the e-ink display and you rolled a roller to move a highlight on the strip to correspond to the line on the e-ink display. Menu's worked the same way, selection was on the off-e-ink screen LCD. The original kindle also had long buttons on the edge of the device for the next/prev page, which made accidental page turns too frequent for the reader's comfort. As a matter of fact, many people complained that you couldn't pick up the kindle without turning the page.

With the Kindle 2 release last month, Amazon has pretty much addressed the most severe of the prior Kindle's shortcomings. The e-ink display is about 20% faster, so now you can move a curson on the display with a 5 way joystick thingy. Refresh is still slow, when moving the cursor fast, there are times the cursor shows up under 3 consecutive words (the prev two have still not refreshed out). but works okay enough for you to get the cursor where you want. The ergonomics are fabulous now, the buttons have been made smaller and they now click inwards. Accidental clicks- Ta Ta. Battery life has increased and internal memory increased to 2GB. With that comes the good old Apple strategy of non-removable batteries. You need to send the device to Amazon if you want the battery replaced (Boo hoo). The display also can now feature 16 shades of grey as opposed to 4.

These details apart, what does it actually feel to read from the Kindle? According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, the device should melt away in your hands only to leave you and the Author's words with you. I must say after finishing about two books on the device-- Yes. It certainly delivers a very pleasing reading experience and then some.

Some of the problems it solves for me are definitely peculiar to me and some of the problems are universal to books. Right from childhood, I have suffered from dust allergy- not just any dust, more specifically house dust. Of which the worst offenders are the fine particles that disintegrated paper leaves behind. The kind that most people would hardly sneeze at- would leave me doubled over. This pretty much ruled out most library books and the only books that I could reasonably read were new ones. If I wanted to read books from a library, a pretty elaborate setup was needed to filter the air between the book and my nose :)

The next problem is something we have learnt to work around-- holding a rather heavy paperback. Most of us have managed to convert this into an art that in itself would require a separate blog to ink out. Two handed grip is common too- but not for long bouts. You can all breathe easy- the Kindle is a joy to hold and its light. Its got enough heft to feel solid without bogging your hands down. When I first saw the Kindle (2), I wondered why there were thick plastic areas around the display. Now I know... to hold it. It works beautifully.

So its all rosy right? NO!

First obstacle is the rather high entry point. At $360, a price that can buy a lot of paper books, its not making it easy for people to jump into the Kindle band wagon. Second is DRM. DRM is a kludgy solution (in my opinion) to fight a real problem (piracy). The limits that E-Books you buy from Amazon has imposed upon it, border on being downright silly.

This is not a review of the Kindle, just a quick report about a device that uses a technology, which has the potential to be a rule changer. Now I look forward to rainy days, a cozy couch, a Kindle in hand and a hot cup of coffee in the other and a dust free reading experience.