Amazon Kindle: First Impressions
Two weeks ago I finally succumbed to the temptation to order a Kindle. Availing myself of my Amazon Prime subscription—a service which may now find itself obsolescent—I had the device in my hands last Wednesday. My goal wasn’t just to have a new and more convenient way to read, but to figure out whether the Kindle actually delivers on that promise.
It came out of its elegant, Apple-like packaging with an image on its screen—not something you expect from a powered-off device. Having seen a Sony ebook reader before, I expected the Kindle’s screen to look fake, and it did. It was as if someone had cut out a piece of printed paper and glued it on the front of the unit. Its somewhat odd power switch worked fine, and it turned on after a few seconds. It was easy to connect it with my Amazon account (I don’t even remember the process, in fact) and wirelessly browse the Amazon store through the 3G “Whisperlink” connection. My first book purchase, which I made from the web site on my laptop, appeared on the Kindle quickly.
My first impulse, and the first impulse of several other new users who got their hands on it, was to tap the screen. I expected to swipe to turn pages, and I presumptuously expected a multi-touch gesture to bring up a coverflow-like view of the pages through which I could scroll by swiping. Somehow I doubt my reaction is unique, at least among iPhone users. At first blush, it seems imperative that future generation devices support a touchscreen.
Actual reading is quite pleasant. Text is almost suspiciously crisp and passive-looking, just like a printed page. The digital paper display is famously slow to update, reminding me of laptop screens from twenty years ago. This makes interactive functions like scrolling through menus, navigating tables of contents, or shopping in the store somewhat frustrating (and it would render my expected touchscreen functionality all but useless), but is easy to overcome in actual reading. I soon learned to anticipate the page refresh delay by pressing the next page button while my eyes were somewhere near the beginning of the last line of text on each page.
Later, I pushed a few of my book purchases to the Kindle app on my iPhone. There is an immediately obvious difference in the feel of reading on the iPhone and on the Kindle. On the iPhone, the expected touch gestures work. There’s still still no multi-touch coverflow interface, but there is a draggable slider that quickly scrolls to any location in the book. The book seems more interactive, and has a massless quality to it. Compared to the Kindle, the iPhone screen itself looks alive. You can quickly be anywhere in a text almost as easily as flipping the pages of a bound paper book. The same text on a Kindle has some random access capability through the table of contents and the search function, but otherwise the slow speed of the display rewards sequential, page-after-page reading.
In other words, reading the Kindle is more like a reading scroll than a bound book—a scroll with a search box.
So my first reaction is positive, and I’m going to continue favoring it for the delivery of new books when possible. I’d like to use it for several different kinds of material (i.e., fiction, technology, theology, article-sized works, etc.) to get a sense for how the different reading habits associated with different texts work on the device. My larger question, which can only be answered over the course of months, is how the new form will alter my reading habits and my perception of the texts themselves. Even if, pace McLuhan, the medium isn’t identical the message in a strict sense, the message is clearly shaped and constrained by the medium in important ways. It seems clear that ebook readers will be a big part of the future of text, so understanding the new form might be a good plan.
