Tropophilia

My birthday was last week, though I unfortunately had to spend the majority of the day taking an evil standardized test.  How’s that for bad timing?  My parents were gracious and awesome enough to offer me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, which we’ve written about some before.  Now, after about a week of fairly regular first-hand use, I’m ready to offer some more thoughts.

When I first turned it on and downloaded a free sample chapter, the thing that most struck me about the Kindle was that, man… this thing is slow.  Every button press is followed by at least a one second pause — a considerable delay in today’s high tech world.  For a device that promises to usher in the next evolution of reading, I was perplexed at first.  Where’s the gee-whiz slickness, the instant page-turns, the animation?  (Amazon’s explains the slight delays by pointing to the E-Ink display, which at its current stage of development requires a little longer to render).

Ironically enough, however, I’ve almost come to appreciate the delay.  Just as the E-Ink display mimics the ocular experience of the printed book, so do these delays mimic the time required to turn a page.  It’s a subtle reminder when you continue to the next page that it is just that — a new page.  You don’t scroll to the next screen on the Kindle; the scoll wheel is only used to access the menu and other features.  You have to take the time to hit a button and wait as the screen momentarily flashes dark, and then rekindles (ha) with the next segment of text.  That brief second gives you a chance to process the page you just read, to look out the window for a moment, to readjust the device in your hands.  Looking back at the past week, I’m not sure now that I’d want it any other way.

That being said, the Kindle does have significant design flaws that cannot be excused by any comparison to the traditional book-reading.  The keyboard is a disaster.  I tested out an experimental feature on the Kindle called “NowNow” that lets you ask any question and have three answers delivered directly to your device by an Amazon research team, free of charge.  My question was maybe 25 words long, and the entire typing experience was a pain in the butt.  The keys are not easy to reach with your fingers when holding the device in the air, and the screen render delay is annoying in this regard since you must wait a second after each letter or word to see if it came out right.

The designers also made a questionable decision of having three humongous page-turn buttons available: one very long “next” button on the right side of the screen, and then a small “next” button on the bottom left edge of the screen with a medium-sized “previous” buttom sitting on top it.  The buttons are very accessible and responsive.  In fact, they are way too accessible and responsive.  It’s impossible to hold the device anywhere near the screen without activating a button.  And then of course the crappy keyboard covers the bottom, so that makes it uncomfortable to hold from there.  So, your thumb is limited to a very small piece of plastic real estate between the keyboard and screen.  What’s more, the presence of the scroll wheel and tiny “back” button on the right side virtually limit you to holding it with your left hand.  All of this is fine, I guess… but not everyone holds books the same way, all the time.

The reading experience with the Kindle is definitely awesome.  The ability to change the text size has convinced me that I read more quickly when words are bigger.  I think this is not only because of pure visibility but also because there are fewer words per line, allowing my eyes to quickly scan over and retain the information contained therein.  The device is smaller than it looks in pictures, making it very easy to carry around.  I was able to squeeze it (with its cover on) into my pants pocket, though I’m not sure I’d do it every day.

The book purchasing experience is marvelous — it literally takes less than a minute once you’ve bought something for it to show up on your Kindle.  The battery life is amazing, especially when you turn off the wireless (you only need it when you’re going to buy something or use the basic web browser).  The great thing about the E-Ink display is that it doesn’t need a current to keep ink in place, so the battery is only used when you press a button.

Seth Godin argues that Amazon made a mistake by choosing not to radically “improve the act of reading a book”.  He wants to “see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers”, to see “notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers” and to be able to “interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books.”

I disagree.  Amazon’s vision for the device is not to drag the book into the age of what CEO Jeff Bezos called “information snacking.”  Its vision is to preserve long form reading by refocusing and re-elongating our attention spans.  Sure, social features and hyperlinks could be interesting… but ultimately they would distract from the story or content itself.  In his interview with Charlie Rose, Bezos says again and again that Amazon’s main design objective with the Kindle was to make the book (or in this case, the e-reader) disappear.  And that’s exactly what it does.

For what it’s worth, especially after using the Kindle, I think Steve Jobs was wrong.  El Jobso said that “it doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. [...] Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”  Did he consider that maybe people don’t read because it’s too inconvenient, especially in face of the convenient information snack store that is the Internet?  What if there was a device that made long-form reading just as convenient as popping onto Google Reader or Twitter?  And provided fewer avenues of distraction, to boot?  Might that turn the tide of reading habits back towards the book?  That’s what Amazon is betting on, and I think they just might have put their money in the right pot.

I’m very happy with the Kindle.  I’m almost halfway through my first book (What Happened? by Scott McClellan), and have adapted to the small design flaws.  I think this will encourage my efforts to get back into reading books.  This puppy will be especially great for planes and commuting.  I’m sure I’ll go into “early adopter depression” when Kindle 2.0 is debuted, but it’s thanks to geeks like me that all the kinks are worked out for the laity.  Right guys?  Right?  Guys?…

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Scurzuzu.