A couple of weeks back Amazon released a new eBook reader, called the Kindle, to a lot of fanfare and blog reactions. As big fans of the concept of eBooks and current users of a Sony reader (which Brooke totally hogged for the last couple of months), we ordered one immediately. It arrived while we were traveling last week and was sitting outside our door when we returned.

The backlash
Many of the aforementioned blog reactions were negative as were several of the reviews on Amazon. A cursory look through these revealed, of course, that very few of the reactions came from people who had ever held a Kindle or even used older electronic-ink readers like the Sony Reader. The complaints generally fit into one of a few categories:

• “I just like the feel of real books.  They smell nice.”
• “Why would I pay for that when I can just read documents on my iPhone?”
• “It doesn’t support open standards like PDFs, you have to buy the books from Amazon, they’re trying to lock you in”
• “A real book is better because you can write notes in the margins”
• “It doesn’t have color”

We’re not technology pundits. We don’t know if this will be a successful product. However, we do feel uniquely qualified to comment since we’re probably one of the very few couples who have both read a multi-thousand page novel on an electronic reader (Anna Karenina for Toby and Sacred Games for Brooke). We also strongly suspect that chattering pundits are not the same people who fly every week and lug around gigantic hardcover novels, nor are they aging baby-boomers with poor eyesight.

The “feel” of books
It’s certainly true that reading on an electronic reader can’t quite match the tactile experience of holding a new hardcover or the good feeling you get from lending a book to a friend knowing that you’ll never get it back. There is a lot of mystique, tradition and nostalgia around books that will always be important. However, the “feel” of lugging a few new hardcovers on your back around Brazil or packing 30 boxes with books and paying for them to be moved from Boston to San Francisco isn’t quite so lovely. In the end there are advantages to each — we don’t think that paper books are going away, we actually own certain books in both media, but being able to carry hundreds of books around, to annotate and search books and for the ability to change the font-size for older readers definitely compensate for some of the losses.

The screen
The most important point to make, and the one that everyone seems to miss about both the Sony Reader and the Kindle, is that you can’t judge the screen until you’ve seen it. It’s true that in photos it looks like a Palm-III era monochrome screen. However, it’s long been understood that traditional screens strain the eyes because they produce their own light unlike paper which just reflects light. Looking at an electronic ink screen is like looking at slightly gray paper — far more pleasant, no eyestrain, and viewable in direct sunlight It also draws no power while holding an image which means that the battery life is rated in page-turns rather than hours. Even if someone could stand to stare at their iPhone screen enough to read Anna Karenina in a week, they would have to charge the battery a few times during the process.

Standards and document conversion
Some have rightly pointed out that when you buy a Kindle you’re buying into Amazon’s “system” for electronic books.  We don’t have a problem with this - nor do we expect that most consumers will - as long as the services provided by Amazon are top-notch.   People have bought into Apple’s proprietary iTunes/iPod “system” because the consumer experience is just that good.

And in any case, the “support for standards” argument is almost entirely specious. The Kindle allows you to email documents to it (an incredibly cool feature) so we tried it with both a PDF and a Word document. Both appeared on our Kindle within a few minutes. The Word document came through very nicely and the PDF worked but had been repaginated to be readable on the smaller screen — this messed up the layout but the document was still readable; unfortunately the images didn’t come through but we imagine that will be fixed eventually. Perhaps the problem people have is paying 10c for the document conversion and delivery, but we consider this well worth the convenience of not having to copy documents over a USB cable (especially when the Kindle is somewhere else) and Amazon also offers a free conversion service where the documents get emailed back to you.

Annotation features
We were really pleasantly surprised by the annotation features that the device has. Highlighting passages in a book is ok, but you still have to flip through the whole book to find the places you’ve highlighted. When reading on the Kindle you can highlight text on the page, which will show up with a box around it whenever you go back to that page, but you can also view a list of all the highlighted passages for any book or even for all your books at once. This is fantastic for noting sections that we thought were really great, which would normally have to be written in a separate notebook along with the page number.

Improvements over the Sony Reader
Amazon has done a far, far better job of marketing the Kindle than Sony did with their Reader. Most people weren’t even aware that the Sony Reader existed when it launched, and now they’ve started a pretty mediocre marketing campaign in major cities. The ability to download books, subscribe to magazines and newspapers and email documents to the Kindle makes it a vastly superior product. We were always surprised that the Sony Reader was sold at airports since it came empty and it wasn’t possible to get books for it without first connecting it to a computer.

What we don’t like
The faux-leather cover that comes with the Kindle is really ugly and doesn’t really hold the it very well. With the Sony Reader we preferred to keep the device in its cover because it felt a little more like reading a book, but the Kindle’s cover will strictly be used to protect it when carrying it around.

The Kindle has a lot of page-turning buttons, which cover most of the right and left side edges. This is annoying because they are easy to push by accident, in fact, it’s almost impossible to pick up the device without pushing the buttons.

The main limitation, as with the Sony Reader, is the lack of titles. Even with nearly 100,000 to choose from, including all the New York Times bestsellers, there are several books we’ve been planning to read which simply aren’t available. Hopefully by saying nice things we’ll do our small part to make eBooks more popular and get more publishers to participate

Sharing
We recently noticed this on the Amazon website: “If you are the owner of multiple Kindles, or have multiple Kindles registered to your account (i.e wife, husband), your books can be re-downloaded to each of these Kindles, up to a limit of 6 Kindles.” We have, on occasion, both bought the same book (go Murakami!), so that we could read it at the same time. Book clubs do this too. If we got another Kindle on the same account, we would both automatically have access to any books that we purchased.

We’re not overly concerned with the ability to read every possible file format, we’ve outgrown the need for long feature lists and the Kindle doesn’t offend our aesthetic sensibilities. We’re people who like books, like to read a lot, travel a lot and are comfortable with new technology. We know it’s not for everyone but after 4 days of using our Kindle, we’re already certain that we’ll need to buy another one (so that Toby doesn’t keep hogging it).