In Which I Am Kindled

It was a most-welcome late birthday present: the new Kindle 3. I’ve written about e-book readers several times, beginning with the very first Kindle and a lamentation over its astonishing ugliness. But Amazon has fixed the ugliness problem, and made a host of other improvements--most notably dropping its price down to a level that people can actually sorta kinda afford. The device arrived on Wednesday so I am now an expert, because fiddling with new gadgets is way more fun than it ought to be.

The whole premise of eInk, and the extra crispness of this new screen, definitely live up to expectations. I’ve had Kindle’s app on my iPhone for months, but I never did much reading on it because of the tiny screen size and the massive, overpowering glare if I tried to read outside. (Which I often do.) In no time at all, I already find myself treating the Kindle almost (almost) exactly like a book. I read indoors, I read outdoors, and if it’s dark I need some light. (No, I did not buy that nifty-looking but expensive cover with the light built in.) The turning of pages is almost automatic, and I find that the length of the screen flash between pages is no worse than the length of time it would take to turn an actual page—often faster, since you never have that problem where several pages get bunched together and you can’t get quite the first one separated, so you spend what feels like twenty minutes trying to flick it loose.

The magnificent difference, of course, is that in a gizmo smaller and thinner than most hardcovers (and weighing about the same, in a cover) I am currently carrying seven books. Which barely scratches the surface of how many books I can actually carry.

Considering that I’m usually in the middle of five or six books at once? This is impossibly cool.

And most of those books were free—material written before 1923 is in the public domain, and there are often multiple sources for copies that can be downloaded at no cost. I’m a little wary of downloading anything that originated in another language, since there’s no telling the quality of the translation, and that leaves out Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Voltaire and hundreds of others; but the whole of English literature pre-1923 is available. Dickens, Forster, Austen, the Brontes, Henry James, the list goes on and on. I even picked up the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Right now I’m reading Silas Marner, and enjoying it a lot. The only book I’ve purchased so far? A complete Shakespeare for $2.65. It looks so good, I can easily imagine a bunch of actors at a Shakespeare festival, standing around in rehearsal, reading from their Kindles.

I particularly like the ability to highlight a chunk of text that I like, and the Kindle will keep it both marked in the book, and stored in a separate area where I can look only at things I’ve marked in various books. If I had Proust on the Kindle, for instance, there’s a quote I’ve been trying to find in it for years without success--but if I could search for it, and then mark it, that would be fantastic. All without “defacing” the book by scribbling in it.

There are things that I miss. The specific thumping sound that a book makes when you tap on it, a sound that nothing else quite makes. (Books make decent drums, actually.) The feel of the paper that changes subtly from one book to another. The pleasant conundrum of what to do with the bookmark while you’re reading. People talk a lot about the smell of a book and I’m sure that’s true, but my sniffer isn’t very powerful so that one doesn’t really work for me. The feel, though--plastic ain’t paper, and that’s definitely a loss. But compared to the ability to easily lug around an ever-growing library in one slim device? I’ll happily accept the loss.