Since August, I have gone from being a died-in-the-pulp paper book reader to having four e-readers in the house. (OK. One is my husband’s…but I did order it for him so he’d keep his mitts off mine.) I have now found the one gadget that I couldn’t live without. I like my iPhone. It’s a decent phone… and it seamlessly integrates with my Outlook at work and calendar at home taking the place of the Palm I used to have… what’s not to like? No manual syncing… and occasionally I play a few fun games on it. But I’m not a heavy phone user… and not a real big fan of texting either. (It takes too long because I refuse to devolve the English language into a series of lol brb Ihtgpdgm “I hope the grammar police don’t get me” shorthand phrases.)
But my Kindle… has saved me from being too cheap to buy books. Not MONEY cheap… but space cheap. I stopped buying fun books to read when we ran out of bookshelf space. For a long time… I just didn’t read unless it was something trashy I knew I wouldn’t keep after I read it. (That I could buy used… or really cheap at Borders.) I read out of the library… or I borrowed books from other people. Anything to keep from adding to my net total of books.
But I love books… so the next thing I did was join paperbackswap.com… and start getting rid of books I knew wouldn’t be re-read… or that I could probably find in the library from now until doomsday. (Copy of the Iliad… Shakespeare’s Plays…etc.) Then I got rid of any hardcovers I could spare. Then I let go of a few books that I “liked” but didn’t love. And any books I owned specifically for work… I actually brought to work.
But in August I bought the wi-fi Kindle because the price finally seemed reasonable. I am a pretty heavy Amazon user… was an early adopter of Amazon Prime… and now use Amazon’s subscription service to purchase a majority of the household dry-goods in bulk. I like Amazon’s customer service. I like their MP3 downloads better than iTunes. (Stuff on Amazon occasionally goes on sale like a normal CD would.) So I figured… why not? I’ll give this Kindle thing a try….
I was reading the Jim Butcher “Dresden Files” books… and had managed to Paperback Swap the first few… but I really liked them… and kind of wanted to hang on to them and not re-swap them. So…I bought the next book in the series for the Kindle. And then the next… and then was kind of hooked on the whole idea of WANTING to read something… and then being able to in about three minutes.
Really… that’s what it takes from turning your Kindle on… navigating through the Kindle store… making the purchase… to completed download. I timed it.
So… after that… I decided any fiction I was interested in would have to be bought for the Kindle. It started with fiction… then I bought ONE cookbook for the Kindle… then a new Thesaurus… then all of a sudden I was a full-blown Kindle user. And when they announced the Fire… I put it on pre-order. The only thing that disappointed me with the wi-fi Kindle… was that I couldn’t see some books in color. Not necessary for most reading… but it was the one thing that was keeping me from buying a lot of travel books and cookbooks for the Kindle. Plus I kind of wanted a tablet computer anyway. And having something small and portable to watch movies on that was a little bigger than my iPhone seemed like a good idea. So… I figured… $200… what’s not to like?
All around… it’s a nice device. But it’s not perfect at anything it does. I don’t like reading on it for prolonged periods of time…e-ink is a thousand times easier to read. But I DO really like it for anything with color photos…cookbooks… to “how-to” books… travel books…etc. And it’s great for the odd Android game I like to play…light web-surfing…and as a kitchen computer. (I love youtube cooking shows. Being able to prop up a tablet in the kitchen to watch them is pretty handy when trying to follow a recipe.) What I don’t like is Amazon Prime movies.
The movie selection is OK… but maybe I don’t like it because I’m a long-time Netflix user. The Amazon Prime Movie interface just sucks. I don’t like not being able to have some sort of queue or playlist feature. If there IS one… I haven’t found it. So it’s pretty much useless because I can’t surf around on my computer for a list of stuff I’m interested in… I have to browse through their entire catalog of Prime movies to find something I’m interested in watching. I do like the rental feature though… because my corner video store was just killed by the two Redbox machines nearby… and I’m kind of sad to see it go. The local video rental store was such an icon of 1980’s and 1990’s movie watching culture… I refuse to support Redbox. So now… I’ll rent from Amazon.
So the Kindle Fire…It’s not so much an e-reader as it is an “Amazon Content Delivery Device… now with Internet!”
And then I was watching Woot… and came across the Kindle DX (wide format) for $200. Damn. Bigger e-ink screen… for $200. And my workplace has gone 5S crazy… and I need to get rid of at least a half-shelf of reference books. For $200… I could download PDFs of all of my manuals and literature into one device. A couple of clicks later… and now I own a Kindle DX… and yeah… the bigger screen rocks. And you really can look at a regular sized page of text without going blind. The handy rotate feature makes it even easier than my Kindle Wi-fi. I loaded all of my manuals and literature onto it… and got rid of four binders worth of paper. The only thing I kept paper copies of were my color publications… and wide format publications.
And with three Kindles I can’t part with… of course I bought my husband one.
What I don’t like about the Kindle… any of the Kindles… is the file organization. On the e-ink Kindle… it’s clunky. If I have 300 documents I want to load into a collection called “Reference Material” I copy it onto my Kindle using the USB feature… and then I have to go onto my Kindle… and individually add each and every document into that collection. Ugh. Cludgy. Obviously not geared towards managing complicated directory structures… and organizing documents. It’s a DISPLAY device… and it does that wonderfully.
It makes me wonder what the next step for hand-held devices is. Five years ago… my Palm Tungsten was my indispensable device. Now it’s kind of… “Palm what?” And with the iPad becoming so popular… I wonder if it will kill e-ink devices. (Which for dedicated readers… is just SO MUCH easier to read than a backlit screen. Please, please, please keep making something akin to e-ink…tech gods… are you listening?)
The only thing I’m not too upset about that everyone else seems to be is pricing. I don’t mind paying near “full-price” for an e-book. The current pricing structure is antiquated. It’s based on the distributor/consignment model that bookstores use. People think that since it costs so much less to “produce” an e-book vs. a paper book… it must automatically be 80% cheaper. But books are priced so everyone who “handles” them gets their fair shake. Your average paperback book… what is it… 40-cents in paper… maybe 60 cents in ink and binding materials plus labor? The largest cost is in shipping and warehouse space. And since some printed paper books will always be needed… the profit from high-volume sales books will ALWAYS have to cover for art books… coffee table books… small releases… and other books that can’t be formatted easily for print on demand. (Photos that bleed off the edge… NOT easy to do on a POD press. There’s still a ton of trimming that needs to be done...etc.) If we priced books based on the cost of production without any thought to distribution… I think the variety and number of publications would go down… not up. Books aren’t paper and ink. They’re not JUST shelf space. They’re the blood, sweat and tears of the author. They’re ideas and emotions and knowledge passed from one person to another. They’re history and laughter… reference and religion. And do you really want all of that cheapened?
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