Introduction
What is it?
Six months ago, Amazon introduced a new product, called the Kindle. Developed by Amazon itself, the Kindle sets out to change the way we read books, newspapers, weblogs, and more.
In a nutshell, the Kindle is a compact, electronic book with instant wireless access to 115,000 books sold by Amazon, an audiobook player, and a wireless Web browser. Kindle uses a cellular data network to deliver books, newspapers, magazines and weblogs to you immediately. This network, which Amazon calls “Whispernet”, costs nothing to use; Amazon provides data connectivity free of charge as part of Kindle’s purchase.
But Kindle isn’t limited to books that Amazon sells — it can read books in Mobipocket or text formats, and it also reads Audible.com’s protected audiobooks, HTML and Word documents, and several image formats (through Amazon’s email-based conversion service). It includes very limited MP3 music support, as well.
What Kindle isn’t
Kindle is a device designed specifically for reading text. In contrast to iPhone and iPod Touch, it lacks color or a backlight, has a simplistic Web browser, and, of course, lacks telephone service — but it does have free wireless and a very long battery life.
And despite running Linux under the hood, Kindle is nothing like a PC or Mac. The screen has only four shades of grey; it doesn’t play videos; it doesn’t run PowerPoint presentations; and it doesn’t play games.
What’s it for?
For $399, Kindle gets you access to Amazon’s instant wireless bookstore. How compelling is that? Well, Amazon’s initial manufacturing run sold out in just five hours, and it took Amazon six months to get it back in stock. Now you can finally buy a Kindle again.
Almost all books now being published are also available on Kindle. New releases are just $9.99, even when their hardcover versions are $25 or more! Backcatalog pricing varies; paperbacks mostly cost $4 to $7.
For less than the cost of a paper book, you get an electronic version, with free backup on Amazon, and save trees. And you can access free content, too, without paying anything: Wikipedia, free books ranging from the Baen Science Fiction Free Library to Project Gutenberg, and free and unlimited Internet access.
If you also buy the occasional audiobook from Audible, Kindle has you covered (despite a registration hassle detailed below). After you register your Kindle with Audible, all your Audible books play on Kindle with on-screen controls.
After spending a few months living with Kindle, we’re very excited about its potential. We use Kindle for pleasure reading (including books from non-Amazon sources), to read the daily newspaper and to read weblogs. Even with its current limitations, Kindle has already begun changing how we use media.
Features and Functions
There are several aspects of Kindle to cover. Foremost, of course, is the experience of reading — can it “disappear” like a good book does? But also important are the shopping experience, its technical foundation, the content “ecosystem” and how it works with a Mac.
Design
Kindle combines a paper-like display (167 dpi, 4-level grayscale) with a custom, anti-aliased typeface to achieve remarkable readability. Six text sizes are available, from tiny to huge; all are crisp and readable. (The home screen and menus use the now-classic Helvetica typeface in a fixed size.)
Kindle’s shell (5.3″ x 7.5″ x 0.7″) is made of impact-absorbing plastic. We’ve dropped our Kindle quite a few times, with no damage to screen, buttons or any functionality we can discern. (Amazon web page has slow-motion video of Kindle being drop-tested, and you can see the case flex as it absorbs impact forces.)
It’s almost impossible to separate discussion of Kindle’s software interface from its hardware. Like iPod, the distinction is almost nonsensical — the hardware and software are intimately entwined, far more than in a traditional Mac or PC.
The enclosure is uninspiring at first glance — it’s no Apple product, inspiring instant lust. A slightly off-white shell with odd angles, thicker on the left than the right… our first reaction was to take a message for Amazon: “The 80’s Shaper Image called, and they want their design back.” But after living with Kindle for a few months, we’ve learned that every design choice, no matter how strange it seems at first, has a good reason.
The beveled edges make Kindle easy to pick up off a table (like the MacBook Air), while the inward-slanting corners help Kindle rest comfortably in the hand. The page-forward and back buttons lie easily below the thumb, when the Kindle is held in the left hand (as clearly intended in the design).
The rear cover is rubberized for gripping and has Kindle’s one real concession to design for design’s sake: molded into the cover are a torrent of glyphs pouring from one corner to another, starting with Egyptian heiroglyphics, Norse runes, and Mesopotanian cuneiform, through Hebrew and Arabic script, Greek, and Germanic blackletter, and finally through the past several centuries of Romance letterform evolution. It’s a brilliant graphic, expressing the evolution of written language … and the heights Amazon hopes Kindle will achieve.
Controls
Kindle’s main controls are on the front face: a unique scroll/click wheel, several buttons on left and right sides, and a compact keyboard at the bottom. Volume buttons are on the bottom edge, while the power and wireless switches are on the back near the top.
The rubberized scroll wheel is the key to navigating the menus and selecting on-screen text. Think of it like a mouse’s scroll wheel, except it controls a silver block that runs up and down the right-hand side of the display. Spin the wheel up the side of the screen next to whatever object you want to manipulate, then click the wheel. Like the iPod’s scroll wheel design, using this control rapidly ceases to become a conscious act. See, spin, select.
The scroller does several jobs. You use it to choose menu options, to select hyperlinks in documents, and to select text. Text selection itself provides several more choices: you can look up words (in the current line) in a built-in Oxford American Dictionary; you can add a highlight (placing a box around the selected text); or you can add notes with the keyboard, the Kindle equivalent of scribbling in the margins.
The Oxford American Dictionary is used to supply definitions for all words on the chosen line.
Select a word from the list to view the full definition.
Your highlights, annotations and bookmarks are also accessible from the home screen in a “book” called “My Clippings”. Its contents are fully searchable, and Kindle backs it up to Amazon over Whispernet. It’s also stored as a text file you can copy to a Mac or PC.
The next most-used buttons are Prev Page and Next Page, which lie along the left side of the screen, and another Next Page button that abuts the right side. Below that is a small button labeled Back, which we initially found a bit confusing as it has nothing to do with paging backwards.
If you think of navigating Kindle like navigating web pages, then you’ll quickly sort out the Back button. After you follow a hyperlink (including menus), the Back button goes back to your last location in your document, or even back to the previous document. This turns out to be immensely useful when reading newspapers, magazines and blogs.
The bottom third of Kindle’s face is occupied by a compact keyboard. The keys are flat and require more effort to press than the big side buttons, making for slow typing. This was irritating until we discovered this meant we could use the keyboard face to hold Kindle without pressing any keys, providing more options for holding the device while reading. We had this sort of experience time after time — wondering why Kindle did something so differently from other devices, then realizing there was a good reason for it. The more we use Kindle, the more we realize how much thought went into it. Even the strange change in orientation of the keys toward the center eventually revealed its meaning: it follows the curve of the thumb’s motion, ensuring a wide target area for every key.
The bottom of the Kindle has a pair of volume up/down buttons, plus a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, a Mini-B USB connector, and a power connector for the AC adapter/battery charger. Kindle has a built-in speaker suitable for audiobooks, but its audio quality leaves a lot to be desired for music — better to use headphones!
Kindle does support playing MP3s, but like Kindle’s web browser, this is considered “experimental”. While audiobooks have a proper controller interface, MP3s are, instead, played in the background while you read, with tracks played at random. There is no way to pause, skip a track, or specify a playlist — you can only adjust the volume, or stop playing entirely. Amazon designed this for background listening, not as a multimedia device. But the fact that support is “experimental” implies that future versions of Kindle’s software may add traditional controls or even playlist features.
Kindle’s Home Screen
Battery and Memory
On the back, near the top, are Kindle’s power switch and wireless on/off switch. These oval chrome sliders are reminiscent of an iPod’s “hold” slider and are easily accessible, even when the Kindle is snapped into its book-like leather cover (included in the package).
A removable, rubberized plate covers most of Kindle’s back. This slides off with a little bit of force, revealing a battery, an SD memory card slot, and a pinhole reset switch. The battery is a 1530-mAh lithium polymer type, similar to that embedded in iPods, iPhone and the MacBook Air. But unlike Apple’s products, the Kindle’s battery is replaceable by the customer, although it’s challenging to remove — you must carefully unplug a connector to Kindle’s internal circuit boards.
Given Kindle’s long battery life, we see this as facilitating end-of-life replacement of a worn-out battery, rather than the kind of regular swap that travelling laptop users often perform. And when that time comes, there’s no gouging — Amazon charges just $20 for a replacement battery. That’s half the price of a Canon point-and-shoot camera battery, a third the cost of Apple replacing an iPod battery, and a quarter of iPhone’s battery cost.
Amazon claims about two days battery life with wireless turned on, about a week without. Our experience indicates that this is realistic. Our first Kindle had terrible battery life, though, getting only a quarter of the claimed time. We suspected a defective battery, and contacted Amazon support via email. They suggested we call their toll-free support number, so they could verify the problem and replace the unit. And sure enough, after a brief conversation, Amazon sent a brand new replacement Kindle overnight and paid for return shipping for the original! We had expected just a battery swap — Amazon is clearly going the extra mile to keep their early adopters happy. [Amazon had no idea that we were writing a review of the product; we bought it like any other customer.]
Kindle runs about two days with wireless turned on, but over a week with wireless off. We eventually developed the pattern of turning wireless off overnight, and recharging Kindle every four or five days. (Kindle recharges completely in two hours using the included AC adapter.)
Reading
Reading on Kindle is remarkably comfortable. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the first goal the Kindle team set was to emulate the book’s most crucial feature: that it disappears into the story as you read.
Of course, Kindle works differently than a dead-tree book, and those differences are stark in the first days of using it. The screen “blink”, as it loads a new page, was distracting at first. But it’s faster than turning a page in a book, and we quickly ceased to notice this.
We experimented with different type sizes for a while, before settling on one most comfortable to our eyes (size 3, which is 11 points tall). A paper book offers nothing like this; the very large type Kindle can supply is just the thing for older eyes, or tired eyes.
Kindle is also designed to facilitate reading several books at a time. In the Home screen, the most recently-read items are at the top of the list (or you can sort by title or author, instead, if you wish). When you leave any book, Kindle remembers your place so you can jump back in where you left off.
Left: An ebook purchased from Webscriptions.net, text size 3 (about 11 points on Kindle’s 167 dpi screen).
Right: The same ebook, with a minor hack to disable text justification.
Reading a newspaper is interesting on Kindle, and we rapidly came to prefer Kindle format — with a few exceptions. Kindle newspapers are hyperlinked, like web pages. When you first open a paper, you see its logo and front page with headlines and short summaries, followed by the complete article list (basically, a table of contents). Click an article to read it; click the Back button to return to the article list; or just keep paging forward to the next article. It’s easy to jump around and read articles of interest.
But Kindle’s limited grayscale display makes photographs almost a complete loss. While the black-and-white infographics of twenty years ago would work fine on Kindle, most newspapers now design their infographics for color or high-resolution black and white printing. Every newspaper or magazine infographic we saw was blurry and indistinct. The Wall Street Journal’s traditional line-drawing portraits are the only newspaper graphics that consistently looked good on Kindle’s screen.
And, newspaper publishers seem to omit sidebar content from their Kindle editions. Usually you won’t know what you’re missing, unless an article happens to say “See sidebar”. This sort of problem was common in early days of web news, too; we hope newspaper publishers fix this problem for their paying Kindle subscribers.
Despite these glitches, we have come to love the Kindle editions of major newpapers such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. There’s no pile of recycling to deal with at the end of the week; we can always find an article when we go back for it; there are no ads; the paper shows up before we’re out of bed, and it is never soggy from being out in the rain!
The Wall Street Journal, Kindle Edition
Browser
Kindle’s built-in Web browser operates in “basic” mode by default, ignoring style sheets and most table layouts, showing simply text, links, and images. An “advanced” mode is also available, which attempts to honor CSS and tables as much as possible, but we don’t recommend it – most websites are designed for displays twice as wide as Kindle’s, with smaller type, and as a result, they’re unusable in this mode.
The browser isn’t very fast, either. Whispernet uses a high-speed data modem, operating on Sprint’s EVDO network, but Kindle’s low-power processor is saddled with a Java-based system that is slow to render pages. Wikipedia is usable, but an iPhone offers a better searching and browsing experience (with more eyestrain) thanks to its fast processor. Once in the midst of a long article, though, Kindle takes the lead for comfortable reading.
The web browser’s Basic and Advanced mode (viewing Wikipedia)
Shopping and Sampling
The beautiful thing about Kindle is that you don’t actually need a Mac or PC to start using it. Kindle arrives from Amazon already registered to your account (unless it’s a gift, in which case you’ll have to login with your Amazon account). You can go directly to the Kindle store via Whispernet, browse and search books, newspapers, magazines and blogs, and buy them. And Amazon has extended its recommendations system into the Kindle store.
Amazon even has the equivalent of browsing a book in a bookstore: you can read a sample of any Kindle book for free, and if you like it, buy the full book. Periodicals (including blogs) offer a free two-week trial subscription; you can drop it before the end of two weeks and be billed nothing.
While browsing Amazon on a Mac or PC, you can send samples to your Kindle (and of course buy the complete work). When browsing any books, Amazon will tell you if a Kindle edition is available. The savings can be substantial, especially for new books. (We did, however, notice some older books priced well over the $9.99 price for new books.)
Content is delivered wirelessly on Amazon “Whispernet”. This runs on Sprint’s EVDO wireless data network, with fallback to 1xRTT mode enlarging its wireless coverage area. [See link to Kindle coverage map at the end of the review]
If you live in an area not covered by Sprint’s EVDO network, you can download Kindle content to your computer, then transfer it to Kindle via USB. Unfortunately, Kindle is not available outside the U.S. because Amazon’s licensing is only with U.S. publishers. (Presumably, like Amazon’s other businesses, Kindle will go international at some point.)
Kindle Store home and book detail. The usual editorial and customer reviews are available as well.
Weblogs
When we first experimented with Kindle, we didn’t plan on subscribing to any blogs. Even though they cost only a dollar or two per month to have delivered to Kindle, why would we do this when we could get them for free on the Web? Well… convenience, it turns out. Getting the latest weblog posts delivered to Kindle wirelessly throughout the day turns out to be quite pleasant, and it means we can read them even without a computer (or iPhone) at hand.
The Ars Technica blog as viewed on Kindle.
Not all blogs are suited to this style, though. Weblogs that are heavy on visuals or photography are fairly pointless on Kindle, as its screen just can’t reproduce the content that makes them compelling. But for frequently-updated text blogs, Kindle shines. (Not to mention, this is an interesting new revenue model for professional and semi-pro bloggers to explore.)
Image-focused blogs are often a loss
Sharing
Kindle supports sharing content — sort of. A Kindle book can be downloaded onto as many as six Kindles associated with one Amazon account, which allows families to share. But, if each household member already has their own, individual Amazon account, there’s no way to retain those distinct accounts and still share books with each other.
By contrast, Apple’s iTunes Store lets each household member can authorize other computers to playback purchased content, and any number of iPods can play it. But sharing Kindle content in a household only works if everyone shares one account, which creates some issues, such as mixing recommendations for multiple people.
To many customers this is a non-issue, but given Apple’s example, we’d like to see Amazon offer more flexible sharing. And periodical subscriptions are not shareable at all. A newspaper, magazine or webblog is delivered directly to a specific Kindle, and even if you copy the files to another Kindle associated with your account, they can’t be viewed. This makes it rather hard to share a daily paper with your spouse!
Technology
Kindle’s technology certainly deserves a mention. The single most interesting component is its paper-like display. Rather than the LCD displays used in most previous book readers, this display uses E-Ink technology invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory.
E-Ink film has hundreds of thousands of tiny capsules containing white and black pigment. A circuit layer, underneath, applies electric fields to swap these pigments from top to bottom — turning the surface light-absorbent or reflective. Unlike an LCD, there is no need to supply continuous electricity to the circuits, because the pigments rest in their last position without power, and the display only consumes power when it changes.
Between the need for the electronics to be constantly energized and the constant drain of a backlight, LCDs are one of the most power-hungry components of any device they appear in. E-Ink neatly eliminates both of these problems, reflecting external light, just like paper. Its black pigments absorb light, like ink, and its white pigments reflect light, like paper. But, just like a paper book, you can’t read Kindle in the dark — you’ll still need a bedside lamp.
Kindle uses Vizplex, the latest version of E-Ink. Early versions of E-Ink took over a second to refresh a display. Vizplex refreshes in 720 milliseconds. That’s still well above the quarter-second perception threshold of “realtime” response, but it makes a Kindle page-turn at least as fast as turning the page of a real book.
Vizplex supports eight shades of grey, but Kindle only displays four. Like the original NeXTstation monochrome displays, this is enough to get the job done but means graphics are limited. We hope to see a future Kindle update to eight grays, which would make a huge difference in the quality of graphics in periodicals and Wikipedia.
Another notable feature of E-Ink is that it can be laid onto a plastic substrate, even a flexible one! This means that Kindle is very resistant to the greatest threat facing LCD displays in laptops — cracking and shattering. Between this and Kindle’s tough shell, it can take some rough handling.
Storage
Kindle has 256 MB of internal flash memory. About 30% of this is used by Kindle’s software, leaving 180 MB available for books and media. Amazon describes this in terms of number of books, saying it holds “over 200 titles.”
We think this is conservative. The electronic versions of novels that run 500-600 printed pages are about half to three quarters of a megabyte, so Kindle could easily store 250 to 300 books. Images (such as cover art, or section-break pictures) would reduce this. In any case, you’re not limited to this storage, because Kindle has a slot for an SD-type memory card (up to 4 GB). With even brand-name 1GB SD cards going for as little as $15, Kindle won’t be lacking for storage.
An unregistered Kindle’s info screen, with a mostly-full 2 GB SD card inserted.
Kindle’s internal memory has 181 MB of available storage when new.
We initially tested Kindle with an old 32MB SD card we had laying about unused. Many older (or cheap) SD cards are quite slow; this doesn’t seem to affect reading books but does show up when moving content between internal and SD storage. We purchased a moderately quick 1GB SanDisk Ultra II SD card from Amazon for about $15 and saw transfer speeds improve substantially.
But this isn’t your only option. Amazon lets you delete purchased Kindle titles from your Kindle but still download them again at a future date (in contrast to the iTunes Store). Since Amazon also backs up your annotations, bookmarks and highlights, this means that Kindle becomes simply a local cache of your purchased content, which is stored on Amazon’s servers. There is no additional fee for this.
There are two exceptions to this feature. First, any content you didn’t purchase from Amazon’s Kindle Store isn’t backed up this way. Second, Amazon only stores a week’s worth of periodicals on its servers, so you can retrieve the past few days’ worth, but older copies reside solely on your Kindle.
Platform
Kindle runs a version of Linux, based on the 2.6.10 kernel, on a Marvell PXA255 processor. The PXA255, derived from Intel’s XScale architecture, is considered a fifth-generation ARM processor. The ARM architecture was specifically designed for low power consumption with good performance and leads the market in processing power per watt. ARM-derived chips are used in iPhone, iPods, Blackberries, and many PDAs.
And although Kindle runs on Linux, you won’t see a command line anywhere. Thanks to enterprising Kindle-hacker Igor Skochinsky, we know that Kindle’s graphical user interface runs in Java, as does much of its core software. Skochinsky also figured out how to convert encrypted Mobipocket books to Amazon’s Kindle format, using your Kindle’s serial number. If you have purchased protected Mobipocket books for other formats, his command-line script will enable you to take that content with you to Kindle. [See links at end.]
Kindle’s software is upgradeable. Earlier this year, Amazon released version 1.0.4, a minor update to fix bugs. (Currently shipping Kindles run version 1.0.8, which is functionally indistinguishable from 1.0.4.) In theory, Amazon could add new features to Kindle via software updates, perhaps turning now-experimental features into core features. (A functioning MP3 controller would be nice!)
Connections
Kindle is designed to function on its own without a computer. The only times it actually might need to directly connect to a computer are to load content not purchased from the Kindle Store, or to register Kindle with Audible.com to play Audible audiobooks.
Kindle’s USB port provides a direct connection to your computer. Loading content (described in detail below) is simple: Turn on Kindle and connect your Mac and the Kindle with a standard Mini-B type USB cable (one comes with Kindle). The Kindle appears on the Mac’s desktop as a removable volume, just like any other USB storage device. If Kindle has an SD card inserted, the card appears as a second volume. Just drag and drop files, eject the Kindle volume(s) when you’re done, then unplug the cable. Content appears in Kindle’s home screen immediately.
Kindle creates a few folders to help you organize content — reading material such as text files and Mobipocket books should go into Documents, audiobooks into Audible, MP3s into Music — but you can’t further organize your content by creating sub-folders. Kindle simply shows all your content in a flat, non-heirarchal list. This is disappointing; we’d like to be able to create folders to organize our older purchases into categories such as fiction, politics, history, science, and so forth!
Confusingly, periodicals are a little different, with individual issues on a sub-screen, but these are not folders in the file system — just a user interface design.
Audiobooks
Authorizing Kindle for Audible is a hassle that demands Audible’s Windows-only software. We installed this software into Windows XP, running on a VMware Fusion system, then connected our Kindle. We had to wait through Windows throwing up half a dozen “New hardware found” messages (every single time we connected Kindle), decline its attempts to install an unnecessary new driver, and finally run the Audible software, which, itself, is stunningly confusing, not to mention ugly. Audible’s online instructions for activating Kindle didn’t match the software’s actual interface, either. We muddled through, activated Kindle, then shut down the Audible Manager software with a sigh of relief.
Once all this was done, Kindle had no trouble playing an audiobook and required no further interaction with Audible’s software. (Until suffering through this, we had no idea just how good we have it with iTunes’s built-in Audible support on the Mac.)
If you don’t have access to any Windows PCs, you won’t be able to play Audible audiobooks on your Kindle. You’ll need to ask a PC-using friend or coworker for help activating your Kindle with Audible’s software, but at least it’s a one-time affair.
Left: Kindle must be activated with Audible Manager
Right: Audiobook controls
Kindle NowNow
In addition to the “experimental” web browser and MP3 player, Kindle has a featured called “Kindle NowNow”. Enter a question, and Amazon will send it to their Mechanical Turk system — humans, the original expert information processors! Up to three answers will be sent back to your Kindle. When you get the answers, you can rate how useful they were.
The humans working on the back end perform web searches to look for answers; their NowNow responses will include a link to the source where they found an answer.
We tried several questions; the usefulness of answers varied. An obscure question about how to check the oil level in a certain European motorcycle model wasn’t answered for a while; the first answer that came in was nearly useless; the second answer (another day later) was mostly correct but provided instructions for a Honda motorcycle instead! But a question on what kinds of malt to use to brew reddish beer resulted in two very useful, informative answers, with helpful links.
Finally, we asked if (deceased) author Robert Heinlein had any children. One answer was very informative; the other simply said “Nope” and then included the entire text of Wikipedia’s entry on the author — a remarkable combination of too little and too much information!
NowNow is an interesting idea, but doesn’t seem significantly better than just typing a question into Google or Ask.com. It seems to be more of a technology project than a service. But then, it is described as experimental!
Content
Although it’s clear that Kindle’s main purpose is to sell content from Amazon, it supports plenty of non-Amazon content too. Since it supports Mobipocket format, Kindle can read a wide selection of un-encrypted e-books from other publishers. And it’s possible to hack even encrypted Mobipocket files to enable your Kindle to read them. The puzzling thing, since Amazon has owned Mobipocket since 2005, is why Kindle doesn’t support protected Mobipocket books to start with.
Still, there’s plenty of free (or nearly free) content out there, ranging from Project Gutenberg’s 20,000-title library of copyright-free, mostly pre-20th century works, to the Baen Free Library of science fiction, not to mention anything you can copy-and-paste into a text file. WorldLibrary.net’s 400,000 books, documents and reports are available for a modest $8.95 annual fee.
Some e-book stores are quite reasonably priced, too (though Mobipocket.com is not among them). Webscriptions.net, which has a lot of science fiction and fantasty content, offers many books for just $4-5. We purchased a book in Mobipocket format, and it just worked when copied to our Kindle. Unlike an Amazon-supplied book, the author’s name doesn’t show up on the home screen, but that’s about as far as the differences go.
While Kindle natively supports only Kindle, PRC, Mobipocket and text books, Amazon provides a free, email-based conversion service that will convert Microsoft Word, html, prc, mobi and text files to Kindle’s native format for you, as well as jpeg, gif, png, and bmp format image files. For ten cents each, Amazon will deliver the converted document to your Kindle wirelessly, saving you the step of connecting Kindle to your Mac or PC.
PDF conversion is available but is considered “experimental”. PDF’s usually contain extensive formatting and images, designed for 8.5 x 11″ paper, most of which will not be preserved for display on Kindle’s small screen — text will come over, but precious little else.
Publishing
Unlike many other e-book vendors such as eBooks.com, Amazon is happy to work directly with authors to publish e-Books. Along with Kindle, Amazon introduced Digital Text Platform, which enables anybody to publish e-books in the Kindle store.
Amazon makes it stunningly easy to publish a Kindle book — just upload a Word, text, or HTML document; pick a content category or two to list your work; add the title and metadata such as author, editor, and contributors; view a preview to check formatting; set a price; and click Publish. Done. It took us just ten minutes to create a Kindle book for publishing, including learning time.
Amazon lets authors set the price (from $0.99 to $200) and gives authors 35% of that. Amazon reserves the right to offer a book for less than the author specifies, but guarantees the author 35% of the retail price. This lets Amazon offer sales and promotions without reducing the author’s royalty, while letting the author set whatever price they think will be most profitable (or sell the most copies — not always the same thing).
The invention of movable type enabled cost-effective mass circulation of ideas, while the photocopier made it possible for any individual to join the publishing game. But Amazon’s Digital Text Platform extends the individual author’s reach from their local community to — potentially — the entire world. And while it can be said the Internet already does this, the Kindle Store provides a market, while Amazon customer reviews provide a form of quality control.
The potential of Amazon’s DTP cannot be overstated. There’s no reason it has to be limited to Kindle; we can’t help but wonder what else Amazon has in store down the line.
One more advantage for publishers is the used market: There simply won’t be one. A purchased Kindle book is yours, and yours alone. You can’t transfer it to someone else, which means no used Kindle books will eat into sales of new Kindle books.
Other Thoughts
Kindle could use a few improvements, but we hope and expect Amazon will keep focused on its essential mission — being a great reading device (which “disappears”, like a book, from your consciousness, as you read).
For starters, better image support for newspapers would be handy, in the form of more shades of grey, and perhaps color someday. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that color is working in the lab, but is still years away from retail products.
Giving publishers a selection of type beyond Kindle’s own custom font would help e-book designers customize their book’s style; today, all Kindle books look the same. A major part of a book designer’s trade is selecting type and layout that subtly complement the content. A great book design adds to the pleasure of reading, and of course a bad one can make good content unreadable. Kindle prevents bad design, but doesn’t do anything to enable great design!
We actually purchased one Kindle book that must have come from a frustrated designer; the publisher somehow managed to load a custom typeface into the book. It was attractive but whatever graphical hack they did made it take three to five seconds to “turn” each page! It was so frustrating to try to read that we deleted it and complained to Amazon, which promptly refunded the purchase price and promised to investigate the title.
In terms of design, we’d like to see a case that retains Kindle’s great usability but looks less like an escapee from the 80’s design world. Sony’s E-ink-based, brushed metal Reader, for example, is both functional and sleekly modern. Kindle can’t be called beautiful; at best it’s functional and inoffensive.
Publishers
Kindle isn’t the first attempt at creating an electronic book. The past decade and a half is littered with failed e-book projects. Blogger Jim Frost provides an excellent history of the e-book and discusses problems and failed projects along the way; see link at end of review. Thanks to Amazon’s influence with publishers (it’s one of the largest single purchasers of books in the world), almost all the major publishing houses are on-board with their latest books. The Kindle library is unmatched by any other e-book vendor; only Amazon has been able to get nearly every publisher on board with their effort. Like Apple’s landmark launch of the iTunes Music Store with the three major US labels, this has enabled the Kindle Store to hit the ground running, offering a huge selection of content that no other single provider could match.
In the six months since launch, Amazon’s Kindle library has grown from 90,000 to 115,000, including a thriving Digital Text Platform community. And while Amazon hasn’t disclosed Kindle or Kindle Store sales, we have to take notice of the fact that they sold out their first manufacturing run in just five hours on launch day! It’s taken six months, but Amazon has Kindle back into mass production to keep up with demand. No other e-book has had this kind of success so quickly, so we think Kindle is here to stay.
Kindle is likely to have market side effects. Almost every US newspaper has faced declining circulation and advertising revenue over the past decade, as users have moved to reading free content online. Kindle’s paid subscription model could provide a new lease on life for these struggling businesses. Consumers get the daily paper delivered to their Kindle reader for just $8 to $13 per month, while publishers have no delivery or distribution costs. (For comparison, a Boston Globe home delivery subscription costs about $31/month, while a Kindle subscription is just $9.99/month. The Wall Street journal, on the other hand, costs about $7/month in print vs $9.99/month for the Kindle edition.)
Education
Beyond its current consumer-centric design, we think Kindle has huge potential in education and vertical applications. School children today carry back-damaging backpacks full of heavy textbooks that would be trivial to replace with one 10.3-oz. Kindle. A 2006 BBC News article reported that half of UK school children suffer a back injury at some point due to carrying schoolbooks, and 8% have back problems that affect school attendance; other studies show school children often carry book loads approaching 60% of their body weight. The health implications are obvious.
We think the first educational publisher to get on board is going to make a killing selling Kindles to schools. Content can be updated at any time, wirelessly, making paper textbooks obsolete the day they’re printed. Reliable subscription revenue for publishers, lower costs for schools, and better student health could come together in one, small package from Amazon.
If the profit motive is insufficient, textbook content might come from initiatives such as CK-12, a community-based project to create high quality, open source textbooks for kindergarten through grade 12, founded by Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla and Neeru Khosla.
Whether the content comes from commercial or philanthropic sources, we believe Kindle will bring big changes in education. Some European cities are already experimenting with similar book readers; the writing is on the wall for heavy paper books.
Reference
Any frequently updated reference documentation is also a natural for a device such as Kindle. Aircraft maintenance manuals are notorious for misfiled errata and corrections; electronic versions could always be perfectly up-to-date without any chance for error — improving overall air safety. Physician’s desk references and the Epocrates drug reference are other naturals for a Kindle device.
Today, Kindle is a repository for your personal books and documents. Almost anything you can express in text can be stored and accessed on Kindle. The free wireless web browser is basic, but provides access to nearly anything on the Internet.
Conclusions
Kindle is not just a book reader. Thanks to its wireless connection, it’s a very convenient reader for many types of content: books, newspapers, magazines and blogs, not to mention Wikipedia and the web in general.
But its main focus is books, and as a book reader, it is superb. Within minutes, you cease to notice the device — what higher praise can be given? Yes, we want more type and layout options for book designers to create beautiful e-books; yes, we want a higher resolution display to make that type even crisper; and yes, we want color. Even with all its advances, electronic readers are in their infancy. The printed book has had over five hundred years of evolution to reach its current state of usability; it’s amazing the Kindle comes anywhere close.
But the Kindle does things no book can do: fully searchable content, including your annotations; hundreds of books in your pocket; continuously-updating weblogs, with no computer needed; almost everything backed up to Amazon’s servers, with no configuration needed.
Kindle is clearly aimed at the sort of book buyers who save their books to re-read, search, or use for reference — voracious readers with sprawling shelves and stacks of books, the readers who built Amazon’s business from an idea to the largest book retailer in the world.
Those who read a book and then pass it on to a friend may not find the Kindle as attractive; it doesn’t offer many benefits to those who treat books as disposable items. But anyone whose house is filled with books should look at Kindle. The Kindle books we’ve purchased and read in the past few months would fill a standard file box in their hardcopy forms; the Kindle is a remarkable de-cluttering device.
There are other electronic readers out there, ranging from PDAs (convenient but with poor readability) to the sleek Sony Reader (with its very limited library of content). Nothing is like Kindle, though: nobody else has the technology, the content, and the ease of shopping and immediate delivery, all in one package. Our Kindle goes everywhere with us now; there is always something to read.
Kindle excels in part because Amazon has designed the entire user experience (like Apple’s iPod and iPhone), in part because of Amazon’s partnership with content publishers, in part because of its connectivity… but mostly because when you read a Kindle, you forget you’re using an electronic device.
It’s just a book.
A really, really flexible one.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- huge library at good prices
- wireless shopping and delivery
- online backup of purchased books
- free wireless Web access
- supports most non-Amazon content
- long battery life
Cons
- newspapers and magazines lack sidebars and infographics
- web browser is limited
- Windows-only software required for Audible set-up
Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback
Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered wirelessly in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
3G Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle; no annual contracts, no monthly fees, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
Global Coverage: Enjoy 3G wireless coverage at home or abroad in over 100 countries. . .
Paper-Like Display: Reads like real paper without glare, even in bright sunlight
Carry Your Library: Holds up to 1,500 books
Longer Battery Life: Now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on, a significant improvement from the previous battery life of 4 days
Built-In PDF Reader: Your Kindle can now display PDF documents natively. Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go.
Read-to-Me: With the experimental Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable
Large Selection: Over 450,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including 101 of 112 New York Times® Best Sellers, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs. For non-U.S. customers, content availability and pricing will vary.
Out-of-Copyright, Pre-1923 Books: Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are available to read on Kindle, including titles such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island.
Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise. When traveling abroad, you can download books wirelessly from the Kindle Store or your Archived Items. U.S. customers will be charged a fee of $1.99 for international downloads.
Free Book Samples: Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy
Choose Which Kindle Is Right for You
The Kindle Store: More Than 450,000 Books
At Amazon, we’ve always been obsessed with having every book ever printed, and we know that even the best book reader is useless without the books you want to read. We are fortunate that we have tens of millions of book customers at Amazon, and as a result, we know the books customers want to read and we prioritize getting those titles. With over 450,000 titles, the Kindle store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. Along with today’s bestsellers, the Kindle store offers thousands of free popular classics including titles such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island. Kindle customers can also discover and download over 1.8 million free, pre-1923, out-of-copyright titles from other websites.
Technical Details
Display: 6″ diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale.
Size (in inches): 8″ x 5.3″ x 0.36″ (203.2mm x 134.6mm x 9.1mm).
Weight: 10.2 ounces (289.2 grams).
System Requirements: None, because it’s wireless and doesn’t require a computer.
Storage: 2GB internal (approximately 1.4GB available for user content).
Battery Life: Read on a single charge for up to 1 week with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as shopping the Kindle Store and downloading content. In low-coverage areas or in EDGE/GPRS-only coverage, wireless usage will consume battery power more quickly.
Charge Time: Fully charges in approximately 4 hours via the included U.S. power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via the included USB 2.0 cable.
Connectivity: HSDPA modem (3G) with a fallback to EDGE/GPRS; utilizes Amazon Whispernet to provide wireless coverage via AT&T’s 3G high-speed data network in the U.S. and partner networks outside of the U.S.
USB Port: USB 2.0 (micro-B connector) for connection to the Kindle U.S. power adapter or optionally to connect to a PC or Macintosh computer.
Audio: 3.5mm stereo audio jack, rear-mounted stereo speakers.
Content Formats Supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.
Included Accessories: U.S. power adapter (supports 100V-240V), USB 2.0 cable, rechargeable battery.
Kindle Features
Advanced DesignSleek & Light At 10.2 ounces, Kindle is lighter than a typical paperback and as thin as most magazines. Barely a third of an inch in profile, you’ll find Kindle fits perfectly in your hands. Simple to Use, No Computer Required Unlike most electronic devices, we wanted to keep Kindle simple. Kindle is wireless and ready to use right out of the box–no setup, no cables, no software to install, no computer required. Ergonomic Design Kindle is easy to hold and read. We designed it with long-form reading in mind. When reading for long periods of time, people naturally shift positions and often like to read with one hand. Kindle’s page-turning buttons are located on both sides, allowing you to read and turn pages comfortably with one hand from any position. Precise 5-Way Controller Kindle has an easy-to-use 5-way controller, enabling precise on-screen navigation for selecting text to highlight or looking up words. Long Battery LifeLong Battery Life—Read for Days Without Recharging With Kindle’s long battery life, you can read on a single charge for up to 1 week with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as shopping the Kindle Store and downloading content. In low-coverage areas or in EDGE/GPRS-only coverage, wireless usage will consume battery power more quickly. Charge Via USB Kindle ships with a U.S. power adapter and a micro-USB cable for charging your Kindle from a computer USB port. The U.S. power adapter supports voltages 100V-240V. Wireless Access With WhispernetGet Books in as Little as 60 Seconds Whispernet utilizes Amazon’s optimized technology plus a high-speed data network to enable you to wirelessly search, discover, and download content on the go. Your books and periodicals are delivered via Whispernet in less than 60 seconds. And unlike Wi-Fi, you never have to hunt for a hotspot. Wireless download times can vary based on 3G or EDGE/GPRS coverage, signal strength, and file size. No Monthly Wireless Bills No monthly wireless bills or commitments. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill. There is no wireless setup–you are ready to shop, purchase, and read right out of the box. Travel the Globe with Kindle Travel the globe and still get books in under 60 seconds. Download books wirelessly in over 100 countries around the world, such as Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Norway, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK), and many others. Stay in touch with news from home by having your newspaper and magazine subscriptions delivered wirelessly while you travel. See wireless coverage map for availability. For U.S. customers traveling abroad, a $1.99 fee currently applies when downloading books or single issues of periodicals wirelessly from your Archived Items or the Kindle store while traveling internationally. To avoid any fees, you can always download books, periodicals, and personal documents via your computer and transfer to your Kindle using USB. Carry Your Library in 10.2 OuncesHolds Over 1,500 Books The ultimate travel companion, Kindle weighs 10.2 ounces and holds up to 1,500 books. No longer pick and choose which books fit in your carry-on. You can always have your entire Kindle library with you. Automatic Library Backup: Re-Download Your Books Wirelessly Books you purchase from the Kindle Store are backed up online in your Kindle book library at Amazon.com. You can wirelessly re-download books available in your library. This allows you to make room for new titles on your Kindle. We even back up your last page read and annotations. Please see more information about . Enhanced ReadingLose Yourself in Your Reading The most elegant feature of a physical book is that it disappears while you’re reading. Immersed in the author’s world and ideas, you don’t notice a book’s glue, the stitching, or ink. Our top design objective was to make Kindle disappear—just like a physical book—so you can get lost in your reading, not the technology. Paper-Like Screen Utilizing the latest in electronic-ink display technology, Kindle provides a crisp black-and-white 6″ screen with the same appearance and readability of printed paper. Sharp and natural with no glare or backlight, reading on Kindle is nothing like reading from a computer screen. Those who see it for the first time always do a double-take. The screen works using ink, just like books and newspapers, but displays the ink particles electronically. And unlike a laptop or smart phone, Kindle never gets warm so you can comfortably read as long as you like. Read what some of our customers have to say about Kindle’s screen: “My first impression of Kindle’s screen was: ‘That’s a screen?! It doesn’t look like a screen.’ When I got my own, I had the same impression again. It looks like a book page, only perfect. No grain or pulp.” —Jeremy “I love how the screen really looks like a page, because I do work at a computer all day, and the last thing I want to look at is another screen.” “I found the contrast to be soothing and I was able to read in direct sunlight with no glare.” —M. H. “I use my Kindle for reading in bed and sitting at my desk. I also did a test read while sitting in full sun and the screen is even more readable.” “Everyone who has seen my Kindle is amazed at the clarity of the screen, ease of use, and plethora of features.“—R.L.S. Read in Sunlight with No Glare Kindle’s screen reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting, eliminating the glare associated with other electronic displays. As a result, Kindle can be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room. Sharp Display of Images and Photos Kindle’s high-resolution screen boasts 16 shades of gray, so images and photos are sharp and clear. Adjustable Text Size Because one size doesn’t fit all, you can increase the text size of your favorite book or periodical with the push of a button. If your eyes tire, simply increase the font size and continue reading comfortably. Kindle has six adjustable font sizes to suit your reading preference. Now every book in your library can be large print. Manual Screen Rotation Manually rotate the display from portrait to landscape to view maps, graphs, tables and Web pages. Built-In PDF Reader Unload the loose documents from your briefcase or backpack, and put them all on Kindle. From neighborhood newsletters to financial statements to case studies and product manuals–you can take them all with you on Kindle. Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go. With Amazon’s Whispernet service, you can send your documents directly to your Kindle and read them anytime, anywhere. Some features such as annotations and read-to-me are not currently supported for PDF. You can magnify PDFs by viewing them in landscape mode. You also have the option to have your PDF document converted to the Kindle format so that it reflows. Read-To-Me Feature With the experimental Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read English newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can choose from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down to suit your preference. In the middle of a great book or article but have to jump in the car? Simply turn on Text-to-Speech and listen on the go. Newspaper Reading Using Kindle’s 5-way controller, you can quickly flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper. Want to remember the newspaper or magazine article you just read? Clip and save entire articles for later reading with a single click. Newspapers are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle before they hit news stands. Bookmarks and Annotations By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You’ll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read. Full Image Zoom Images and photos display crisply on Kindle and can be zoomed to the full size of the screen. Personal Document Service Via Whispernet Kindle makes it easy to take your personal documents with you, eliminating the need to print. Each Kindle has a unique and customizable e-mail address. You can set your unique email address on your Manage Your Kindle page. This allows you and your approved contacts to send Word, PDF documents, and pictures to your Kindle via Whispernet for a small fee—see details. Kindle supports wireless delivery of unprotected Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), PDF, HTML, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC and MOBI files. Some complex PDF and DOCX files might not format correctly on your Kindle. You can transfer personal documents to your Kindle via USB for free at any time. Built-In Dictionary with Instant Lookup Never get caught without a dictionary. Kindle includes The New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions, so you can seamlessly look up the definitions of English words without interrupting your reading. Come across a word you don’t know? Simply move the cursor to it and the definition will automatically display at the bottom of the screen. Never fear a sesquipedalian word again–simply look it up and keep reading. Wireless Access to Wikipedia Kindle also includes free built-in access to the world’s most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org. With Kindle in hand, looking up people, places, events, and more has never been easier. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase walking encyclopedia. Search Kindle’s keyboard makes it easy to search within a book, across your library, in the Kindle Store, or even the Web. To use the Search feature, simply type in a word or phrase you’re looking for, and Kindle finds every instance in your book or across your Kindle library. Looking for the first reference of a character in your book? Simply type in the name and search. You can extend your search to the Kindle Store to find related titles you may be interested in. Explore even further by searching Wikipedia and the Web. Web access is not currently available for some customers outside the U.S. Audiobooks With Kindle, you are able to download and enjoy more than 50,000 audio titles from Audible.com, including bestselling audio books, radio programs, audio newspapers, and magazines. Due to their file size, audiobooks are downloaded to your PC over your existing Internet connection and then transferred to Kindle using the included USB 2.0 cable. Listen via Kindle’s speakers or plug in your headphones for private listening. Read Kindle Books on your iPhone or PC Experimental FeaturesThe experimental category represents features we are still working on to enhance the Kindle experience even further. Try them out and let us know what you think. Read-to-Me With the Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read English newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can choose from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down to suit your preference. In the middle of a great book or article but have to jump in the car? Simply turn on Text-to-Speech and listen on the go. Basic Web Browser Kindle’s basic Web browser works well to read simple, text-centric Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Need to find a movie listing or look up a sports score? Now it’s easier than ever to find the information you’re looking for right from your Kindle. The experimental Web browser is not currently available for some customers outside of the U.S. Included in the BoxKindle electronic reader, U.S. power adapter (supports 100V-240V), and USB 2.0 cable (for connection to the Kindle power adapter or to connect to a computer). |
Kindle is just over 1/3 of an inch
Carry your library in 10.2 ounces
Read in sunlight with no glare
Sharp display with 16 shades of gray
Adjustable text size for comfortable reading
Use the keyboard to add annotations to text
Built-in Dictionary with Instant Lookup
Built-in PDF Reader
Shop the Kindle Store right on your device |
