Most of what you think you know about the Amazon Kindle is probably wrong. It’s been subject to a strange process whereby people who have not seen, or touched, or used the thing themselves are foaming at the mouth online in their eagerness to tell everyone else how awful it is.

This is particularly interesting when you recall all the commentary on the iPhone earlier this year. Steve Ballmer famously said that it was the ‘most expensive phone in history’; it’s not even close, but this didn’t stop this from being repeated all over the place. Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft, though, so at least you can get a sense of his underlying motivation: he’s spreading FUD because he hopes that that will lead to increased revenue for Microsoft.

Much of the anti-iPhone FUD was harder to figure out; a lot of it came from journalists who are suspiciously critical of everything Apple does, and who are widely assumed to somehow benefit from the gains of Apple’s competitors. One of them, John C. Dvorak, has admitted that he writes ridiculous things (particularly about Apple) because this gets him more attention, and thus more fame, and more money.

Brett Arends of TheStreet.com wrote a column on July 5 that said that an iPhone ‘cost’ $17,670. What the hell? Turns out that he was calculating the amount of money a person in the 25% income-tax bracket would have to earn to pay the roughly $2,000 total cost of ownership over two years, and then figuring what that money would earn over 25 years if it were invested in a 401(k) retirement account.

Now, this is nuts, but it’s at least roughly true. Compound interest is a marvelous thing; but compound interest acts the same on money not spent on a Blackberry as it does on money not spent on an iPhone.

And do not forget that a lot of the FUD came from random bloggers who had, presumably, nothing at all to gain from their criticism. Still they criticized, usually without ever having used an iPhone.

Is the iPhone perfect? Not at all. Its e-mail client is adequate but nothing more; the iPod functions add some capabilities over the classic iPod, but lose some as well; the much-touted YouTube capabilities are hamstrung by the fact that YouTube hasn’t been converting their videos quickly enough; it lacks a lot of basic Bluetooth capabilities; it doesn’t have enough storage; and the camera is strictly average, at best.

But the iPhone does have strengths that, for many people, make it the best smartphone available. Is it for everyone? No, but then nothing is.

The point I’m trying to make here, and the reason I’ve been talking about the iPhone for several hundred words at the beginning of what is ostensibly a review of Amazon’s Kindle book-reader thing, is that technology reviews are, by and large, awful. The professional reviews are awful, and the amateur reviews are awful. Most of the people — even the professional journalists — who review things seem to come into the exercise with their opinions already formed, and with their expectations based solely on their desires and not on reality, so that you generally cannot trust what they say.

Doom-mongering is a favorite pastime of all technology reviewers. Most technological gadgets do what they say, and work reasonably well. After all, their designers and manufacturers put considerable effort into making sure that this is true. This makes for boring copy, though, just like in regular news.

The news media love pronouncements of doom, and they go out of their way to frame stories in such a way as to make everything seem worse than it is. You might have recently seen stories about new statistics that show that about 25% of homeless people in the U.S. are military veterans. This was the subject of bold headlines, pointing out that this was wildly disproportionate to veterans’ representation (about 11%) in U.S. society as a whole.

What nobody in the media bothered to do was note that:

1. Chronically homeless women are almost nonexistent, for a variety of reasons, and
2. 22% of American males are military veterans.

Which means that veterans are slightly over-represented among the homeless; which shouldn’t be too surprising, given that ‘the military’ is an enormous organization which draws a lot of people who have few skills or abilities. There are undoubtedly very few Ivy-League graduates among the homeless; but this is because the people who are most likely to become homeless are not admitted to the Ivies in the first place. Apparently people who join the military are very slightly more likely to become homeless than is the general population.

But ‘Veterans Very Slightly Over-Represented Among Homeless’ is not an interesting story, so it doesn’t get written.

So it goes with everything. If you lived in a cave and only knew of the world through newspapers, you’d certainly be amazed that the world hadn’t collapsed yet, given that everything was always terrible. When housing prices were rising in the U.S., the papers reported about the ‘housing crisis’ that this caused in that people were being priced out of the market. Now that housing prices are falling somewhat, the papers are full of stories about how bad this is.

The point is that the media — which for my purposes here include weblogs — lives on a steady diet of crisis and catastrophe, and that they will seek out the negative in anything. And this is before you take into account the considerable publicity benefits in naysaying: the headline ‘Gadget Performs As Advertised’ does not get Dugg.

Which brings me to the Kindle.

Here’s the executive summary: The Kindle does what it says; it does not lock you in to any scheme of Amazon’s in any serious way; it’s easy to use; the screen is pretty good; it’s not ugly; it appears to be fairly hardy.

The Kindle’s Appearance

A lot of hay has been made of the appearance of the Kindle. It’s got a strange shape, and it’s made of matte-finish white plastic. A lot of allegedly smart people have complained that they would ‘never buy one’ because it’s so ‘ugly’. Many of these are the same ones who complained about the iPhone being a ‘toy’ because it wasn’t ugly; there’s just no pleasing some people.

FUD point #1: What other consumer-electronics product in the last five years has been criticized for its looks? I can’t think of one.

I use Apple computers, and I have an iPhone. All of these things are very nicely designed, and very beautiful; Apple products come in for a lot of criticism, but not on the basis of their looks. What you don’t hear about, because the reviewers by and large don’t use these things for very long, is that all of this Apple gear is very delicate. My laptop and iPhone are covered with tiny scratches, because those nice finishes are pretty susceptible to damage; they’re selected for their looks first, and their durability second. I dropped my iPhone a while back, for instance, and it’s very slightly bent. You can’t see this at all, but the chrome bezel is very, very slightly out of alignment with the metal back of the phone. If you can’t see it, what’s the problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is: the gap is just wide enough for hairs to get into, and get caught. When I take the phone away from my ear, about 20% of the time it yanks on my hair.

Most non-Apple laptop computers and mobile phones, on the other hand, are made out of plastic and have finishes which are chosen for durability first and looks second.

A lot about the Kindle’s appearance seems to be about this kind of durability. White plastic won’t show scratches; and if you drop the thing, its relative lack of right angles will tend to cause the deceleration it experiences upon hitting an Immovable Object to be relatively gradual. Its number of planes helps to ensure that nearly anything will be a glancing blow.

But there’s another point to the Kindle’s relatively dowdy appearance: it’s a non-gadget gadget. One of the main features of the Kindle, and one which hasn’t been discussed too much, is that you never need to plug it into a computer. You don’t even need to have a computer to use the Kindle effectively.

Amazon’s target market for the Kindle is not Gadget Freaks, but Book Readers. A lot of people — and a greater proportion of hard-core Book Readers — are opposed to gadgets on first principles. Gadgets are frivolous, and they grow rapidly obsolete. This doesn’t particularly bother me, but both of these characteristics run directly counter to the values of a lot of people who buy a lot of books. The fact that the Kindle looks not entirely unlike something from 1988 is potentially a selling point for a lot of its intended market. The white plastic suggests that the Kindle is explicitly not about fashion, but about function, which is likely to reassure the elbow-patch community.

Holding the Kindle

Some of the complaints about the page-turning buttons are justified. Both sides of the Kindle consist mainly of buttons. It’s hard for me to hold the thing in a comfortable position without hitting one of them. When I hold the device in my left hand, the ‘next page’ button falls nicely under my thumb, which must be just as it was intended. The problem is that there’s nowhere to rest my thumb in between page-turns except on the screen.

I find that I need to hold it a bit higher up in my hand that feels natural, and position my thumb at rest on the logo under the screen. This causes a little bit of strain after a while, and I find that I need to move my hands around a lot.

It would be nice to be able to turn off either the left-hand or the right-hand page-turning buttons somehow.

The buttons on the little keyboard have a stiff enough action that you don’t accidentally press them while reading; and they don’t seem to do anything anyway while you’re in reading mode.

Ways In Which The Kindle Is Superior To Actual Books

The Kindle does not flop closed if you’re reading it while eating. This means that you do not have to invest in a leather-upholstered cosh to use as a book weight.

Right now, I have 37 books loaded onto my Kindle, but it still only weighs 287 grams. Since all of the books I have on there right now are ones that I own on paper, I took the trouble to weigh them all: over 18 kg.

Actual books do not have wireless network connections that can download new books. Or magazines. Or newspapers. Or websites.

With the Kindle, you buy the infrastructure once (or once every such-and-such a period, anyway), and then the content as you go along. If you read a lot, this can represent a big savings.

Actual books do not allow you to search their contents except by riffling through the pages. The Kindle builds an index of anything you load into it.

Electronic books do not present a storage problem.

Ways in Which Actual Books Are Superior To The Kindle

Actual books don’t have batteries that need charging.

With actual books, you purchase the infrastructure (paper) along with the content (words); thus this cost is spread out over time.

With actual books, the infrastructure is redundant. If you drop your copy of Swann’s Way in the toilet, you can still read other books.

Actual books look better. The Kindle’s screen is pretty good — arrestingly good, actually, if you haven’t seen an electrophoretic display before — but it’s still not as good as ink on paper.

The Kindle’s Screen

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. On the screen at once right now, I have 174 words from part one:

parents, who hoped that in this way they could keep mud and vegetable debris off her skirts. The strategy had not been completely successful, but with a quick brush, John and Gwendolyn were able to transfer most of the dirt onto their white gloves. From there it went straight into the air. Most gentlemen’s and ladies’ gloves nowadays were constructed of infinitesimal fabricules that knew how to eject dirt; you could thrust your gloved hand into mud, and it would be white a few seconds later.

The hierarchy of staterooms on Aether matched the status of its passengers perfectly, as these parts of the ship could be decompiled and remade between voyages. For Lord Finkle-McGraw, his three children and their spouses, and Elizabeth (his first and only grandchild so far), the airship lowered a private escalator that carried them up into the suite at the very prow, with its nearly 180-degree forward view.

Aft of the Finkle-McGraws were a dozen or so other Equity Lords, merely earl- or baron-level, mostly

In the hardcover first edition of the book, this text is split between pages 9 and 10; page 10 contains 468 words. If I turn the font size on the Kindle all the way down, it fits 240 words on a page.

The screen is pretty good, when you’re displaying text. The contrast could be better; the blank areas are a bit gray, like very cheap recycled paper. The screen isn’t white to begin with, and e-ink displays always seem to have a bunch of stuck e-ink globules that make it darker:

Click on the image for a bigger version.

Still, it’s not bad; the overall impression is of looking at black text on slightly gray paper. The bigger problem with the display is the typeface; it winds up looking distinctly like Apple’s old New York typeface printed on an Imagewriter. This is something that needs attention; there’s no reason why the text should look so bad at 167 ppi, even on a 2-bit screen (i.e. it can display ‘white’, black, and two shades in between). It’s not really the anti-aliasing that’s the problem; it’s the fact that the typeface seems not to be the optimal one for this display.

The typeface is PMN Caecilia, which I think was chosen because it has slab serifs — that is, the little hookuses on the ends of the letters are pretty square, as you can see in this sample from the Veer website:

It’s not an ugly typeface by any means: but the Kindle seems to render the serifs a bit too heavily, and the letters wind up looking a bit unbalanced. (Compare the lowercase a in the type specimen with the one on the screen to see how the Kindle winds up distorting things.) This is something that can be pretty easily fixed in software, so I’m not too worried about it.

Another Way The Kindle Is Superior

The efforts of the copyright industries and the U.S. Congress to sew up perpetual copyright has resulted in there being a relative paucity of audio and video available in the public domain — and what little there is is usually technically pretty bad, coming as it does from the infancy of those technologies.

The written word, on the other hand, hasn’t changed all that much in hundreds of years. Much of the very best literature in English is in the public domain, but the manufacturing costs of books are such that you’re still paying $10 for Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, even though nobody’s paying any royalties to Charles Dickens.

You can buy a Kindle version of Martin Chuzzlewit for $5.99 from Amazon. Or you can get it for free from the Gutenberg Project. Or download a nicely-formatted version for free from Mobipocket, which is run by Amazon.

There are a lot of out-of-copyright books which are out of print, too. If you want to read one of these, you generally need either to have privileges at a large university library, or a lot of money to spend on Alibris.

Content

There has been an enormous amount of FUD about the Kindle’s file-format support.

The Kindle supports, natively:

1. The proprietary Kindle .azw format, which appears to be the same as the Mobitext format with DRM added
2. Un-DRM’d Mobitext e-books
3. Text files.

Most of the FUD centers around two points:

1. Amazon charges you $0.10 to put files on the device
2. The Kindle does not support PDF.

Point #1 is simply false. Amazon charges you $0.10 to deliver files to the device over the EVDO connection — the EVDO connection for which you pay nothing otherwise. If you convert your content into a compatible format yourself and transfer them onto the thing with the USB cable, there’s no charge. And Amazon will even convert the files for you, for free, and send them back to you, for free, if you send files to name@free.kindle.com. Sending them to just name@kindle.com will get them delivered to the Kindle for $0.10 each. This kind of charge is unusual, but then so is the network connection that Amazon pays for.

Point #2 is sort of true, and it’s something of a bummer as PDFs are a pretty widely-used format for e-books; but if you think about it for more than about ten seconds, it makes sense. The whole point of a PDF file is that it should look a certain way, and be a certain size, no matter where it’s displayed. The page size is determined when the PDF is written, and this page size is nearly always either A4 or 8.5×11 inches. The Kindle’s screen isn’t that big, and it doesn’t refresh quickly enough to allow you to pan around the page as you can on a laptop with a small screen, or on an iPhone. Ergo PDFs wouldn’t work well on the Kindle even if the software supported them.

To put a PDF on the Kindle, you have to have it converted by Amazon’s e-mail service. My experience with this has been that conversions of text PDFs works well enough. If I wanted to do a lot of reading of text PDFs on the thing, though, I’d convert them to text files and then load those.

The Kindle supports garden-variety text files quite nicely; anyone who says that Amazon is attempting to lock people in by means of their proprietary files is simply and thoroughly wrong. Project Gutenberg files require a little massaging for best results, but the Kindle will display them without any tweaking whatsoever.

And of course it supports Kindle books that you buy from Amazon — about 90,000 of them right now, most of them priced fairly reasonably. You can’t do as much with them as you can with paper books (you can’t resell them, for instance), but then they’re cheaper than paper books.

Not long ago, most e-books were priced higher than their paper counterparts, on the theory that the e- nature of these books imbued them with special value that the paper versions didn’t have. That’s certainly true, but the publishers then conveniently ignored that the e-books were also lacking value that you got with the paper book, and that there was no need to manufacture and store the e-book version. And so nobody bought any e-books at $50 and the publishers proclaimed the whole thing a failure.

Another Way The Kindle Is Superior

The iPod is a success not because of the iTunes Music Store, but because you can easily (and quite legally, no matter what the record companies say) convert all your CDs to mp3s, which you can then carry around and play on the iPod.

What about books? Most people don’t have book scanners at home; and even if they did, operating a book scanner is a pain in the ass.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to scan books. The first involves guillotining the binding off, and then feeding the pages through a sheet scanner and OCRing the output. This is a pain in the ass.

The second method is even more of a pain in the ass, because it involves possessing a highly specialized piece of equipment that essentially photographs each page in the book. And then you have to have an undergraduate on a work-study program turn the pages, or monitor an extremely complicated automated system that turns the pages automatically. And none of this works very well.

So, what’s the solution? Usenet and Bittorrent, as always. Though it was diminished significantly by the recent disappearance of the excellent Demonoid website, there’s a thriving pirate e-book community out there. Really obscure things are, as usual, obscure. But if you want to read your Tom Clancy novels without lugging those things around, there’s no need to pay again for content you’ve already paid for: anything that’s at all popular is quite readily available.

The pirate e-book scene isn’t anything like as large as the pirate music or movie scenes, in large part because until very recently these things weren’t all that easy to use. You can read books on your computer screen, or on your Treo, but by and large people don’t want to. With e-book readers on the radar thanks to all the publicity the Kindle has received, this might change.

This is likely to transform the publishing industry. It’s going to be largely destroyed by e-books, I think, in the same way that the music industry is being destroyed already by mp3s. This might not happen right away, but sometime soon the displays will mature to the point where you can see two pages side-by-side, with resolution and color capabilities similar enough to the printed page as to make a reasonable substitute for a lot of people. Even this won’t kill off real books entirely, any more than television has killed off movies or the CD has killed off vinyl records. But it will make a very, very significant difference. Real books will, like vinyl records, be sold for nostalgia purposes or where their physical nature adds some specific value. Actual printed paper books will never die off to the extent that vinyl records have, if for no other reason than that no special equipment is needed to use a paper book. Books will perish to the degree that they are inconvenient, and survive to the degree that they are convenient.

What value do publishers add to the process? Mainly, they have the capital to lay out to cause books to be manufactured and distributed. With usable electronic book readers, the cost of both of those things has fallen to something very close to zero. Editors don’t need to work for publishing houses, and the only other thing publishers do — gatekeeping — they do spectacularly badly. Publishing houses are always going on about how some huge percentage of the books they publish do not earn back their advances. This would suggest that the publishers are either paying advances that are too large, or selecting the wrong manuscripts, or both.

Kindle Summary

It’s too soon yet for me to tell whether the Kindle is any good or not; it requires use to tell. The main issues are going to be eyestrain and hand-strain from holding it, and those require more evaluation. One other issue might be the fact that there is less text to view at a time than in a regular book. Possibly because of the way I read, I already find myself, not infrequently, at a new page wondering whether I’ve managed to skip a page somehow. This often happens to me with paper books, too, but because there are two pages to view at a time in a paper book, it can only happen 50% as often; and it’s quicker to flip back a page in a paper book to re-read the last line.

Overall, though, so far the Kindle isn’t bad. It performs as advertised as far as reading books goes.

I’m not sure how well the web browser will work, yet. If a page is formatted properly, it’s potentially excellent. Unfortunately, few web pages are formatted in such a way as to work well with the Kindle. Since few people have ever made the adaptations needed to make their sites work well on PDAs, I don’t think we can count on them making changes for something like the Kindle. However, I think that the sites most likely to appeal to Kindle users — Project Gutenberg, for instance, and anyone else distributing large text documents — will probably find it worth their while.

Because the special feature of the Kindle isn’t its text-displaying capabilities; Sony has had something that’s almost the same size with almost the same capabilities for a couple of years now. The Kindle’s special feature, and the thing for which it will be remembered in twenty years, is the network connection. Just as the iPhone turned the mobile-phone subsidy on its head by spreading it out over the two-year period of the contract, the Kindle has turned the gadget-with-network-subscription model on its head by building the cost into the initial price. Sony’s e-book reader costs about $300, so figure the cost of the network hardware and subscription is $100 plus whatever Amazon figures your impulse purchases are worth to them.

Amazon has long been battling against the fact that, while they usually have the best prices on everything they sell, they have the disadvantage of being separated by their customers by UPS or FedEx. My last post was on how it was going to take eight days from order to receipt of my Kindle, even though I paid for good shipping, because UPS doesn’t work on weekends or holidays. If it was anything that I needed urgently, or that could be obtained elsewhere, Amazon would likely have lost the sale.

Some time ago, Amazon launched their Amazon Prime program, where you pay $70 once a year to cover two-day shipping on all your orders. Since only people who order a lot, and who expect to order a lot, will sign up, and since once you’ve signed up it’s in your interest to order as much as possible from Amazon, I would imagine that this results in Amazon effectively subsidizing the shipping of a lot of their Prime customers’ orders.

This works out for them, though, because the shipping delays are such a big problem for them, and one that, by and large, they can’t do anything about.

Except with the Kindle. In one fell swoop, for everyone who buys one, Amazon will go from being the bookstore with the lowest price but the longest delay, to being the bookstore with the lowest price and the quickest service.