Kindle

Ok, so I finally caved and got a Kindle. I’ve been resisting this whole e-book thing. I like paper books. I like the experience of reading them, the tactile sensation, the texture of the pages, their heft and physicality. I’m always aware of where I am in a paper book, in some subliminal way. With electronic documents, I always feel sort of in limbo. I’ve got one page in front of me, and I can look up and see that it’s page 53 of 211 or whatever, but that gives me no intuitive sense of place; I have to stop and do the math. There’s also something I find reassuring about a wall full of books. There’s all that knowledge and imagination right there.

I like being able to share books. If I like one, I can loan it to a friend, and we can share that experience; I don’t have to convince them to buy their own copy. If I don’t like it, I can pass it along to someone who will, or donate it to the library, and then it doesn’t feel so much like money down the drain.

Books are pretty durable. If I drop one or get it wet, I can still read it. I don’t have to worry about its batteries going dead. It makes me itchy that Amazon can delete e-books if there’s a copyright squabble (as happened infamously, and ironically, with 1984). I wouldn’t want to wake up one morning to discover that all of my books are gone because Amazon got hacked, or went out of business, or whatever. Or maybe the Kindle becomes like a Betamax. I have to buy some new device if I want to read new books, and I have to maintain some crusty bit of hardware to read my old ones on. Eventually it breaks for good, and I have buy them all over again in a new format if I want to read them.

What changed my mind, or at least made me willing to give the Kindle a try, was the realization that anyone growing up with one would find paper books awkward and bizarre. Almost everything that I like about books also has a downside, and electronic books have some handy features of their own that would be hard to live without if you were used to them.

That physical, tactile experience comes at a pretty high price. A single modest paperback is about the size and weight of a Kindle; lugging around even three or four is hassle. A Kindle can hold thousands. Even a single book can be too heavy to read easily (Cryptonomicon, anyone?). You have to hold books open while reading them; they tend to fall shut. If you want to stop reading and do something else, you have to put a bookmark in them, or you’ll lose your place. How annoying is that?

Books in aggregate take up lots of room. You have to buy furniture just for your books. In my house, the layout of the rooms is largely determined by where the bookcases can go without covering windows, vents, and outlets. That’s crazy when you think about it.

Sure, I can’t loan out Kindle books, but that also means I don’t have to worry about getting them back. I’ve lost count of how many copies of Snow Crash I’ve bought, and I still don’t have one on my shelf.

In some ways, my library is probably actually safer on a Kindle. If my house burned down, I could buy a new Kindle and re-download all my books. The Betamax analogy? On further consideration, I don’t think that really fits; text formats are easy to convert. That also means that there’s no reason for an e-book to ever go out of print. That’s a pretty big win.

The new feature I use the most on the Kindle is the built-in dictionary. I can just move the cursor over a word, and the definition pops up. Very handy when I’m reading old books (more on that in a moment). It has full-text search. No more cursing a crappy index and paging through, trying to remember where you saw some passage or quote. In fact, you can search not only within an individual book, but across all your books, in case you forget where that line is from. It’s also got features that I haven’t used yet for attaching comments directly to the text, and for sharing quotes via Facebook & Twitter.

Oh, and it’s got free 3G and a web browser. It’s slow and clunky and limited, so you can’t really do any serious browsing, but it’s fine for looking stuff up on Wikipedia. So it’s also a pocket encyclopedia. That’s handy.

So anyway, after all that arguing back and forth, I decided to go for it. I got the Kindle instead of an iPad because I like its limitations. I like the fact that it’s pretty much single-function. I like that the web is there if I really need it, but it’s awkward enough that I’ll stay off it otherwise. I don’t want to be able to do anything besides read on it. I don’t want apps. I don’t want the distraction of knowing that I can easily switch to my email or a game or whatever. I have enough trouble staying focused as is.

Even worse - in case that isn’t evidence enough that I’m a cranky old man who Doesn’t Get It - I haven’t even bought any books for it yet; I’m just reading free classics. Partly, I’m road-testing it, making sure I can actually stand to read a novel-length work on it. (It looks like the answer is yes on that.) But it’s also that there are so many good free e-books out there. Amazon’s free classics list is a great place to start, and you can browse recommendations from there. The versions on Project Gutenberg are actually better quality, but it lacks summaries and recommendations; check there once you know what you want.

There’s something really kinda awesome here. The Harvard Classics are available for free. Wikipedia is free. So for the price of a Kindle, you can give yourself a great books education. I don’t think there’s any reason the cost of these shouldn’t keep dropping as e-Ink readers get more popular. What happens when they’re $10-$20, pre-loaded with classic literature, non-fiction, and reference works? I suspect there’s potential out there to do something interestingly disruptive with grade-school education.

I’m still not sure what e-books I’ll actually buy. I could see buying electronic copies of books that I love and want to be able to re-read; though it may be hard to convince myself to pay for them twice. There are books that are good, but which I don’t need to re-read. Those, I want to be able to pass along. I don’t think it makes economic sense, but it would feel wasteful not to. Books that aren’t very good, I don’t need to pass along; I could delete them with a clear conscience. The trouble is that I don’t know which category a book is in until I’ve read it.

Let me just pause to point out my own insanity here: Kindle books generally cost about what a movie ticket does these days. Why am I worried about a book being a throwaway experience? Ok, let’s not get into that bit of psychology now; that’s a whole ‘nother essay.

So I’ll have to report back in a year or so on how I’ve ended up actually using my Kindle. For now, I’m happily working my way through Walden and Sherlock Holmes, and it delights me that this futuristic little device is being used to read books that are upwards of a hundred years old.