A Week with the Kindle

I have had about a week with the Kindle, so here are some early impressions.

This thing - while just a fairly simple electronic device - is a significant development for readers everywhere.  (Lawyers are, by training and temperament, voracious readers).  I believe this is a significant development on a number of fronts.

First, it works for books.  This basic element is no small feat.  I actually have some considerable experience with electronic books, having tested one of the first ones in the law school environment in the fall of 2004.  My students were all provided with a USB drive that contained three of their law textbooks for the year at no extra cost.  All of them purchased the physical book as well.  Some were glad to have the eBook version.  But note taking - which law students do a lot of - did not work very well.  And ultimately few used the electronic version of the book.  

But the Kindle has many advantages over that early experiment.  Perhaps the most important of these is the eInk technology, which really does look like a book page, and is easier on the eyes than reading on a computer screen.  There have been other eReaders with eInk technology but the Kindle has a big advantage in that it is connected with the Amazon website, and the wireless connection is on all the time, and that feature is free.  In one of the many elegant touches in the Kindle it arrives at your home already connected to your account on Amazon.

This means that if you ever are stuck somewhere and would like to read a book - which perhaps sounds preposterous to some, but happens to me all the time - you can.  You simply browse the Amazon Kindle store, and select a book, and it is downloaded within the minute.  Their catalog of Kindle books, at over 260,000, really is just more than the “popular novels” like Stephen King - there is, for example, a good selection of books that I am reading a lot of lately: commentary on the new digital disorder (such as Here Comes Everybody, Grown up Digital, etc.)  Even smarter - if you find a book you think you would like to read, but you’re not sure, you can download a free sample - also within a minute.  With a physical book you have to wait a couple of days to get your hands on it, so having it instantly is a big plus.  But with a physical book there is no way to read a sample.  They won’t FedEx the first 30 pages to you.  Having a sample - which are generous samples in terms of length - you can tell whether you really want the book.  I have a few books I have actually purchased in print form that I downloaded the samples for.  I have had the physical book for a while, but have not been able to get to it.  I have already found with one of these that I have read the sample on the Kindle, and have been drawn back to the physical book.  This back and forth is new. 

And there are many things that are new with the Kindle.  I have already commented on the usefulness of the iPhone for Kindle app.  I may not have the Kindle with me at all times, but I do have my phone.  So I can read a book I am reading on the Kindle for a few pages.  What’s really well designed is that when I go back to the Kindle, it is synced to where I left off on the iPhone.  That’s just smart.

  

As for the reading experience itself, it works better than I thought it would.  Clicking the “Next page” button becomes second nature (as turning a physical page does) and you get used to timing it out so that you are finishing the page, and changing it just as the page is refreshing, so it seems in some ways less of a delay between pages than with a physical book.  

Added to all of these capabilities is the ability to have the book read to you with a computer voice, but a very good one, in either male or female voices.  And if you have a few audiobooks you have not gotten to on your iPod (as I do) you can download them to the Kindle for that boring night in a hotel out of town, or long airplane flight.  I now have about 8 books, 6 sample books, and four audio books on the Kindle.  (I also have a copy of my own book that I have ginned up - just to see how to do it.  I have asked Lexis to officially publish it on the Kindle, and they are currently considering it).

So, in terms of books, the Kindle is an important development.  But what about textbooks, which is important to legal educators?  In that regard, the stock of books available is thin, and I am not sure even this better technology will work that much better for a law school casebook, at least not soon.  You can certainly read a case in your Contracts casebook on the Kindle.  But the problem with those casebooks is that they are limited to that sort of instruction.  I describe in my book how textbooks need to migrate to a hybrid model, with some print, and some online - and the online portions being more interactive and engaging than just a case.  In this respect, the Kindle is behind - it will display a case just fine, but it remains limited to text.  I have a few words below about what I think the future looks like for the Kindle, and that will go a long way towards addressing what is needed in the world of textbooks, but for now, the Kindle is lacking in this respect.

Another thing I have found astonishing about the Kindle is how it works with newspapers.  I have to start this part by noting that I have been a voracious consumer of newsprint since I was 11 years old.  I grew up with the New York Times arriving at our New York City apartment doorstep every morning at 7.  Over the last dozen years, I have gotten up early every morning to read always two, and usually three, print newspapers.  Recently, it has been the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News, the latter of which, unfortunately folded (after nearly 150 years in continuous publication) just a month or so ago.  The Rocky subscription automatically switched to The Denver Post, so now I am reading that paper.

I have always felt that the proper reading of a newspaper inextricably involved the physical act of turning the pages, and scanning the headlines, and folding it to focus on a particular story.  We all have developed a series of imperceptible acts in reading a newspaper that amounts to a form of “editing” for our own interests, and we do this quite quickly.  We personalize the newspaper for our own interests every time we read it.

I was, admittedly, skeptical about the ability of the small screen on the Kindle to replicate the physical act of reading and scanning a newspaper - one that is so ingrained in me, and has been for many, many years..  So I subscribed to one of my favorite newspapers that I can’t get delivered to the door - The Washington Post - on a 14 day free subscription (they offer these 14 day freebies for every newspaper available at Amazon, which numbers some 20 or so papers now).  I lived in Washington for five years - when I was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice - and I grew to love the reportage of the Post in those years.  But I have missed it for now nearly 20 years.

Now, every morning, I read the Denver Post, The New York Times, and then pick up the Kindle to read the Washington Post, which has been automatically downloaded to the Kindle while I slept.  I am, quite simply, astonished at how well the newspaper works on the Kindle.  It takes a bit of explaining (which I will skip), but once you get used to it, flipping the “pages” is quick and easy.  You can still scan the article headlines and move to what interests you.  The lack of physicality does not matter - at least not to me.

I had this odd epiphany one of these mornings last week.  I often wake up around 4:30 in the morning when I hear the newspaper delivery.  I hear the car coming down the street, and then slow down, and then the “thunk” of the paper, and then the car drives away.  For some time, I have been thinking about, and reading about, the struggle that newspapers are having to find a financial model that works - once Craigslist took away classifieds (always a cash cow for the papers) it made life very difficult for them.  

And suddenly - reading the Washington Post on the Kindle, and it’s working, and I’m glad to have “back” a paper I have missed - something shifted.  At least it did for me.  The cost of purchasing newsprint, the cost of the ink, the presses, people to run them (and keep them running) the environmental impact of those efforts, combined with the car and the gasoline and the pollution of running the car to drop the paper on my lawn… and - well - it just shifted.  Significantly.  Why are we doing this?  Why all the effort and cost and impact to drop the paper on my lawn when I can read it automatically on this quite effective device?

Is it perfect?  No.  The screen could be bigger, and should be (and apparently, that’s in the works).  It really should be in color.   That would make the photos pop, and become more useful and informative as a result (right now you can tell what they are, but the impact is lost in 16 shades of grey).  But the “killer app” will be when video can be embedded in the newspaper story, much as they are on the web.  Do you remember the newspaper in the Harry Potter movies?  Where the pictures move?  That’s what we need, and it is not too far off.

And then we get back to textbooks - where the case can be read and annotated, and then linked to a video, and an interactive exercise.  THEN we will have effective textbooks that work on this sort of device.  Until then, not so much.

Two final notes: The Kindle also works well for blogs.  I have subscribed to a blog (which is ridiculously cheap: $0.99 per month).  It updates all day, and I can check in with it several times a day.  Yes, I can do this on the iPhone and I can do it on the Web.  But it is useful to have it integrated with my other regular reading on one device.

Lastly, you can PDF documents to your Kindle.  This is cool on a number of levels, but I will mention two.  One, you can do research in Google books (which is finally getting to the size that it is becoming very useful for scholars) and download a PDF of something fairly obscure (but important to you).  Then, E-mail it to your Kindle and read it there.  Second, I have asked my faculty services librarian at our law school - the incomparable and irreplaceable Diane Burkhardt - to E-mail me documents on my research topics that she thinks I need to read.  I asked her to send it to my regular E-mail address (as she always does) but also to the Kindle address.  So over the summer, when I am working on my research projects, I will have the Kindle with me, and I can see that she has sent me things she thinks I need to read.  

Oh, one last thing.  It even works on the web - it has a very rudimentary browser.  Not great.  Slow.  But useable in a pinch.  Very helpful to look up something on Wikipedia, just for a quick reference.  And the built-in dictionary is more helpful than I thought it would be.

Enough for one week of observations about using the Kindle!  If I have more, I will post them.

Comments

[Jim Milles]

I'm sold on the Kindle too. I bought the first version of the Sony eReader, but gave up on it after a couple of weeks. The selection of titles was poor, there was no native sync software for Mac OS, and screen refresh was too slow. The Kindle store has an excellent and growing selection of titles, and wireless downloading of content is a delight.

PDF works fine on the Kindle, but for law journal articles, I prefer to download them from Westlaw in Word format and mail them to my Kindle. Westlaw's Word conversion preserves the footnotes as hypertext links, and it's remarkably easy to click back and forth between text and footnote. I mail them from Westlaw to myself first, rather than directly to the Kindle, so that I can change the filenames from the WL Document number to something more useful--author's last name and a short title.

Color displays would be nice, but I imagine it will be a couple of years before the technology is cheap enough to be within reach. $359 for the Kindle 2 is high enough; I wouldn't be willing to pay more than that for color. I also imagine color will drain the battery quickly, and video even more so. If you turn off the wireless on the Kindle 2 when you're not using it, you can run it for a week or two of reading without charging it.

The biggest obstacle, I think, is DRM. You can't borrow a book on the Kindle, nor can you lend a copy to a friend. Fortunately, DRM has pretty much gone away in music since Apple and Amazon saw the light; I believe it's only a matter of time before the same will have to happen with ebooks as well.