The Washington Post reports:

Research posted last Wednesday in the online journal BMC Public Health reports that when 4,254 Canadian kids ages 10 and 11 were asked to indicate how much they agreed with the simple statement “I like the way I look,” 7.3 percent of the girls and 7.8 percent of the boys didn’t agree at all.

So 7% of the kids said they didn’t like the way they look. That means that 93% of them did like the way they look, at least to some extent. Never mind: let’s focus on the tiny minority: there might be money to be spent.

For girls in the study, body mass index (BMI) was directly linked to body satisfaction: The more overweight the girl, the less she liked the way she looked. The unhappiest boys, though, were those who were either the most overweight or the most underweight: They didn’t like being fat, but they didn’t want to be too skinny, either.

O tempora O mores, these kids — seven percent of them, remember — don’t like being fat, but don’t want to be too skinny, either. Or, in the case of the girls, they just don’t want to be fat. Something Must Be Done About This.

And we’d better do it quickly; because after we get done Doing Something about kids feeling bad about being too fat, we need to get to work preventing kids being too fat. Because we seem to have decided that people (including kids) need to look a certain way — but that nobody (or no kids at least) should feel at all bad about not looking that way.

But one pattern they found might provide insight that could be used to develop ways to work kids through their body-image issues: Rural girls and girls whose parents weren’t well educated were particularly likely to say they weren’t happy with the way they looked, regardless of their BMI. The researchers suggest that perhaps there’s more pressure to look good among rural kids, or perhaps urban kids already benefit from existing programs that help them manage their body-image issues.

Or possibly the girls of ‘better educated’ parents have had it drilled in to them that the answer to this question is that It’s Okay No Matter What You Look Like. The horrible cost of this — ugly people in unflattering pants, waddling around the mall with ice-cream cones stuck in their mouths — is not counted.

I’ve written about the Amazon Kindle before here, on a number of occasions. I think, but cannot be arsed to check, that I have pointed out that the Kindle is a gadget designed for long continuous use, and that a lot of its reviews — which involve a reviewer who might not necessarily be a reader poking at the thing for a few hours — reflect this.

Nicholson Baker’s recent long-form Kindle review in the New Yorker illustrates both approaches in the same article.

He starts out with nitpicking:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This is a legitimate criticism of the Kindle; the screen isn’t white and the type isn’t black. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that the device itself is white, and that the screen’s ‘white’ feels darker than it really is by contrast.

But in another way it’s not a legitimate criticism, because the Kindle’s purpose is not perfect color fidelity. The screen is perfectly readable, which is the only point. This tendency toward a Failure To See The Point is the main reason I titled my original Kindle post ‘The iPhone and the Kindle’. The iPhone, which was released a few months before the Kindle, was (and in some cases to this day is) conspicuously missing a few features that are almost universal in cheaper phones.

For example, in the US, you still can’t send or receive MMS messages with an iPhone. You can’t transfer contact information (or, really, anything else) using Bluetooth. You can’t transfer, say, contact information from one iPhone to another — which doesn’t sound like that big a deal until you need to do it. You can’t add storage to the phone by sticking in a cheap memory card. When the iPhone was first released, you were limited to only the pre-loaded Apple applications, and Apple’s strong implication at that time was that this was all that would be allowed forever. The camera sucked. Many of the initial reviews focused on these things to the exclusion of the fact that the iPhone was, at the things it did do, at least a couple orders of magnitude better than anything else.

And so it is with the Kindle. I’ve made this point before, but I’ll make it again because it’s so important. The whole point of the Kindle is the electrophoretic screen. That’s it. You can read electronic books on your computer screen (or iPhone screen) ‘for free’, but that isn’t as good as reading them on the Kindle’s screen, and with the Kindle’s impressive battery life. This fact continues to be lost on most of the reviewers, because they dink around with the thing for a little while and conclude (correctly) that the navigation controls are bad.

This is only a tiny bit less irrelevant than is pointing out that the iPhone is at best a poor hammer. The Kindle has only one important navigation control: the ‘Next Page’ button. The Kindle has only one important mode of use: reading page after page of text. Everything else it does is hung on the side, and the device isn’t optimized for it.

By the end of his New Yorker article, Baker has seen the light, at least a bit:

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks [compared to reading the same book on the iPhone]. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawnmowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

The Kindle disappears. There you are.

However, after almost two years of using the Kindle, I have come across a few things that I believe are genuine flaws.

1. The Kindle is too modal. The Kindle has two gross states: awake, and asleep. When the Kindle goes to sleep, the text on the screen is replaced (at a small cost in battery power) with a ’screensaver’ image (though the screen doesn’t need to be ’saved’ in the way old computer CRTs did) featuring, usually, some famous author. You can put the Kindle to sleep manually by frobbing the switch, or if you leave the thing alone it’ll go to sleep on its own after ten minutes. This wait-before-sleep time is not configurable by any normal means.

After long enough, this gets annoying, because it takes a couple seconds for the Kindle to wake up and put text back on the screen. Since the Kindle doesn’t consume any appreciable power while it’s just sitting there idle and waiting for you to turn the page, the whole purpose of the screen saver is to show you that the device has gone to sleep and locked the buttons. It would be far, far better to have a physical switch that locks the buttons while leaving the screen alone. The user could check the current mode by looking at the physical switch; power wouldn’t be wasted putting up a bad picture of John Steinbeck; and I wouldn’t have to wait for the thing to re-draw the screen before starting reading again.

2. The Kindle’s wireless access is too modal. You can turn the wireless service on, or you can turn it off. Leaving it on results in the batter being drained much more quickly — it dies in something like 2 days vs. a week with the wireless service off. There’s no real advantage to having it turned on while you’re just reading a book.

But if you read books on both the Kindle and an iPhone — as I have recently started to do — it is vitally important that the Kindle have the opportunity to upload your current position in the book when you put it down. When you fire up the iPhone Kindle application, it syncs your position and you can pick up where you left off. This is brilliant, and it is the entire reason for a number of Kindle book purchases I’ve made recently.

For most of my Kindle-using life, I’ve been loading it with text I have obtained elsewhere; this is easy to do, and it’s indistinguishable, for the most part, from official DRM’d Amazon Kindle Editions.

But only the official DRM’d Amazon Kindle Editions will sync your position between multiple devices. This is a hell of a feature, a real added value that helps justify the bafflingly high prices the publishers want for some of these e-books.

The problem, though, is that this adds another step that gets in my way. I keep the wireless service turned off most of the time, but I need to turn it on for a little while when I pick up the Kindle (to pick up updated positions from iPhone reading), and when I put the Kindle down (to send updated positions for the benefit of the iPhone). That’s nuts. The Kindle’s wireless service should have three states: ‘On’, ‘Off’, and ‘Off, but connect after I’ve read something and send the position, and connect when I pick up the device to read again to check for updated positions, and connect once a day or so to check for new content’. ‘On’ already approximates this — the radio isn’t turned on at full blast the whole time — but the battery life suggests that it spends a lot more time powered up than it really needs to for my purposes.

3. The Kindle needs to look better. I was a defender of the appearance of the Kindle early on, but the plasticky nature of the thing (I currently use a Kindle 2) is starting to wear on me. I still believe that the extremely mundane look of the Kindle was and is deliberate; the idea is that it shouldn’t look so gadgety. I think that my change of opinion is related to my use of the Kindle and the iPhone Kindle app together somehow; the Kindle has moved from being just a display device (where the plastic business didn’t bother me) to being a futuristic reading device out of a science-fiction novel. The problem is that the ‘white and plasticky’ part gets in the way of the ’science fiction’ part. It’s time for the Kindle to start looking at least a bit more like the sci-fi marvel that it is.

I fully expect the upcoming announcement or release of Apple’s now rumored-to-the-point-of-near-certainty ‘tablet’ device — which will, of course, look like something from the future — to produce a lot of ‘Kindle Killer’ type stories, which will all be written by non-readers and predicated on a misunderstanding of the screen technologies.