As some may recall, I bought Sheryl a Kindle for her birthday this year, just before the new version came out (typical of me). So to make it up to her – and so I could have one for myself – we purchased a Kindle II for Sheryl and I took over her Kindle I, reregistering it in my name. The new one arrived the other day and it’s obvious the Kindle 2 is better, especially in the important area of page advancement. Nevertheless, I have been ploughing through Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man on my Kindle I and am already a convert. (I know – beware the convert, but read on.)
Reasons? Let’s start with that other important area: book-shelving. It’s almost a given that every time you either buy, or have built, new bookshelves, they are not enough. Like gases in Boyle’s Law (well, sort of), books expand to the space given them – and then spill over. I’ve been dealing with this all of my life. Many of us have. And, yes, I love the feeling/texture of hardback books and enjoy seeing them in my home/office, particularly those written by friends and family (even ex-friends). I even enjoy the clutter in certain ways, but enough is enough. I need some relief.
And then there’s the other obvious matter of portability. For the frequent traveler, as I seem to be these days, these gizmos are a dream, particularly since we are already carrying laptops, cameras, iPods, cellphones and who knows what? Do you really want to lug two or three hardbacks, or even paperbacks, if they still exist, as well on a medium or lengthy trip? Amazon keeps a library of your Kindle books online for you, accessible everywhere. [Boy, you do sound like a convert.-ed]
So with the Kindle along and in hand, my suspicion is we read more. In this techno world, we are used to interacting with electronic devices and almost feel guilty if we don’t (having spent the money). It’s a ‘use it or lose it’ kind of thing. Also, in our increasingly frenetic lives, devices of this nature help us get in more spontaneous reading time. (Remember the distant vision of sitting under a tree with a book? O, les beaux jours. Now I whip out a Kindle or an iPhone on a supermarket line.).
But here’s something interesting: My Kindle is linked to my iPhone via Amazon’s Whispernet. They keep up with each other and I don’t lose my place anywhere near as often as I do with regular books. (My mother told me long ago not to dog-ear pages.) But I have noticed that it is often better to read on the iPhone. Although the screen is about one-half the size of the Kindle, it is brighter and works well in almost all situations. The Kindle needs better illumination, at least for my eyes. (I will have to check the Kindle 2 on this.)
Whatever the case, I am now convinced the future of books is to a large degree electronic. Blacklisting Myself will be on the Kindle soon and I am looking into how to get the Moses Wine series on. More on that shortly.
PJM Home
Pajamas Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
The clause regarding "hate speech" has been deleted because readers criticized it as being too loosely defined. We agreed.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that Pajamas Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pajamasmedia.com.
16 Comments
1. David Thomson:“Let’s start with that other important area: book-shelving. It’s almost a given that every time you either buy, or have built, new bookshelves, they are not enough. Like gases in Boyle’s Law (well, sort of), books expand to the space given them – and then spill over.”
Oh my goodness, there are time that I envy the functionally illiterate. They don’t have the problem of finding room for their many books and publications. I am currently working on reorganizing roughly 3,000 books. Sometimes while feeling sorry for myself, I begin to imagine these books having sex during the night and reproducing. There seems to be no way of winning this hopeless battle. I must have been a bad person in a previous life.
Mar 22, 2009 - 12:48 pm 2. Barry Dauphin:I will be buying the Kindle 2 in the (hopefully) not too distant future. Giving my current practices, the Kindle 2 will pay for itself in under two years. The ome delivery subscription to the WSJ went up a whole lot, but is $9.99/mo for the Kindle 2 and it will be waiting for you when you get up. No more leaving the house with the paper not having been delivered yet. The cost of WSJ home delivery over two years exceeds the cost of Kindle plus subscription to WSJ for two years.
Also you can convert pdfs to the Kindle format. Although I wish they made that process less cumbersome, it will be very good to have a large store of pdfs on the Kindle too. I think the Kindle 2 looks like a winner. Although I want an iPhone, I’m still not ready to plunk down the hefty monthly charges for it, but I will get one eventually.
Mar 22, 2009 - 12:56 pm 3. LTEC:I have not seen a discussion of how things work on the Kindle that are not normal text.
What about footnotes that are supposed to appear at the bottom of the page? What about footnotes that are supposed to appear at the end of the book? What about various kinds of illustrations? A recent book I read had a map that extended over two pages of the full-size, hard-cover book. Do any of these things work well — or at all — on the Kindle?
Mar 22, 2009 - 1:36 pm 4. heathermc:I have a huge number of books, organized (I was a librarian and CANNOT STAND DISORGANIZATION.) This Kindle thingy interests me, though. I understand that we Canadians cannot buy it yet. However.
How do you download stuff? Like, what is the technology involved? Are we thinking satellites? Broadband?
But then. Forget dog eared. I like scribbling and underlining and etc. I am truly disgusting. My relatives bought me an expensive reprint of illustrations from the late 1700s (2 vols, John Kay). My first impulse was to cut out the pictures… my only excuse being, the paper used in the reproduction is that shiny slick stuff which I despise.
It is an interesting fact that the messiest, most dogeared, sliced up area of a university library is that where Library Studies andInformation cowers. Really.
Mar 22, 2009 - 1:52 pm 5. Patrick Armstrong:I know exactly what you mean about Boyle’s Law and bookshelves. However, I’m biting the bullet and getting rid of books I’ve been lugging around for years but know I’ll never read again.
(And as a fast reader, I can never take enough books on a trip. For I while I carried Herodotus on trips because you can open it at random and read something interesting.
PS I’m a Canadian and can’t get the thing but it does sound like a pretty good idea.
Mar 22, 2009 - 2:22 pm 6. NRA Life Member:I don’t have Kindle and I do have jammed up bookshelves, so I should think about it. After all, how many of these do I reread (Witness by Whittaker Chambers, for one). Anyway, I really dropped by to encourage Roger to complete “The Forgotten Man”. Look for the quote from Henry Morgenthau (Sec. Treasury) from 1939 or so that sums up the FDR spending as more debt with nothing to show for it.
History will very likely repeat itself. I guess it’s nice that people with no power other than a vote read this stuff, but you’d wish that Obama, Emmanuel, Biden or just one of these latter day fascists would open their minds and learn some history, just for bloody once.
Mar 22, 2009 - 3:54 pm 7. Kindle User:So you are going to put your book “Blacklisting Myself” on the Kindle! I wanted to download your book on my kindle, but I had to buy the hard copy. I have gotten so used to being able to change the type size on the Kindle and reading with my hands free, that it is an adjustment to read the real thing. I am half way through your book and thoroughly enjoying it, but if it became available on Amazon Kindle store I would download it immediately.
Mar 22, 2009 - 4:58 pm 8. Eric:I read with amusement your account of buying your wife a Kindle 2 so that you could have her old one, as I did precisely that same thing.
I don’t have an iPhone, but I’ve got the Kindle Reader software on my iPod touch, and it has (I believe) the same functionality, although it needs a wi-fi connection to synch with the online account. Anyway, I’m amazed at how easy it is to read books on what I previously considered to be a too-small screen. I’m on my third Kindle book, and about 90% of my reading has been done on the iPod.
In response to LTEC’s question about footnotes, the two books I’ve read thus far with footnotes have hyperlinks to each footnote. Each footnote then has a “return to text” link. Couldn’t be easier to navigate. However, I suspect it also depends on how the publisher did the conversion from the printed text. I understand that it’s up to the publisher to decide whether text will be left- or fully-justified.
The Kindle software also allows you to electronically bookmark a page that you might want to return to later.
Roger, did you and your wife combine your Kindle accounts? We did, so that we could share all the books in the library.
I agree with the premise that e-book readers, when done properly, increase the amount of reading one does, and that’s got to be a good thing. In my opinion, Amazon has done the Kindle very well. Authors around the world should rejoice!
Mar 22, 2009 - 5:10 pm 9. vb:Is there a classy way to give a Kindle download as a gift? What will we do for stocking stuffers when Kindle rules the world?
Mar 22, 2009 - 5:17 pm 10. Mike_K:I have had mine for a month now. My wife gave it to me a BD present in hopes that I would stop buying books. I love it, to her great satisfaction. I have noticed a couple of things. I’ve been reading Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor this weekend. They must have scanned the text because I notice that I’s and 1’s are interchanged. I’ve also noticed a few other such transpositions. It is very convenient for reading while lying in bed or on the coach; especially with a large book like this one. It usually returns to the same page when you set it aside and then start it up again. Sometimes, but not always, it will regress to the last major division a few pages prior to the page you left it at.
The books are downloaded via the Sprint network and I can buy a KIndle version of a book from my laptop and it will download the next time I turn on the KIndle. There appears to be a function for highlighting and taking notes but I have not used them.
One annoyance is the fact that I cannot loan the book without loaning the KIndle.
Mar 22, 2009 - 5:39 pm 11. Mike_K:I meant to add that this novel, and the reason why I am rereading it ten years later, contains two major predictions of Clancy’s. One was flying a passenger jet into a building as a weapon, which is how it ends. The other is a nice description of the follies of programmed trading and how the stock market can be taken down with the derivatives. Clancy is a very good futurist. The story is about a war with Japan and the new George Friedman book, The Next 100 Years, predicts a war with Japan later this century.
Mar 22, 2009 - 5:43 pm 12. Roger L Simon:Kindle User, sorry you had to go dead tree, but glad you like the book. Regarding when Blacklisting will finally be on Kindle, that is out of my hands. It went via Encounter Books to Amazon – and the Amazon, as we know, is long.
I’ll certainly note on here the moment I know the schedule.
Mar 22, 2009 - 5:54 pm 13. Bolie Williams IV:Firstly, paperbacks are still around, I almost exclusively buy them.
Second, my brief foray into pricing the Kindle & downloads found that the kindle downloads were pretty expensive compared to the paper boook and required the Kindle to utilize. I guess I’m old-fashioned, but I have trouble paying more for digital downloads than I would for a paper book (or even almost as much). It could be that my limited selection of books just happened to be the most expensive ones, though.
Mar 23, 2009 - 2:25 pm 14. Mike_K:The Clancy novels, for example, are $6 per copy for the Kindle version. That’s paperback price. I susopect it will be market pricing as the medical textbooks I checked are close to (about 25% less than ) the hard copy price.
Mar 23, 2009 - 6:02 pm 15. LTEC:Eric — Thanks.
Mike_K — How does Kindle handle the diagrams/photos of a medical text?
Mar 23, 2009 - 8:54 pm 16. juliet:How is kindle for people with visual problems. I know I can change the font size but what about the glare; the worst problem for me is the lighting on the screens. I can read read book print but sometime that is diffcult. Getting interesting large print editons can be expensive & diffcutlt. The good thing is books out of copyright is readily avaiable in large print.
Mar 25, 2009 - 11:40 am