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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]
APRIL 2, 2009
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Michael Giltz
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Posted March 30, 2009 | 03:39 PM (EST)
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Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
Read More: Amazon , Books , E-Reader , Electronic Books , Kindle ,
Public Domain , Sony , Entertainment News
Most of the reviews of the Kindle 2.0 had to be
thrown together by people who spent a few hoursplaying with them on deadline. I decided tospend some two weeks with my very firstelectronic book device to really get a feel for itand see what it was like.
Clearly, electronic books are going to be around
in one form or another and the news has beencoming fast and furious since Kindle 2.0 came
out. There's an app for the iPhone, publisher Thomas Nelson is offering a free ebook and audiobook for everyone who buys a hardcover from them on select new titles (this is the wave of thefuture in my mind), Google is offering 500,000 public domain titles in easy to use formats for theSony E-Reader, Fujitsu is selling a color electronic book in Japan for $1000 and on and on and on.
So here's my take on the Kindle 2.0. I'm an aggressive book reader and collector and will surely die
surrounded by hardcovers and paperbacks. I read probably 100+ books a year, as well asnewspapers and magazines and blogs and the such. I can't imagine not holding a "real" book in myhand. However, I travel a lot and sometimes find my luggage weighed down with books I mightwant to read (and books I buy overseas). I also commute a lot on trains and buses. Recently I waslugging around Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie, a 900 page monster about the naval arms race
before World War I and it did occur to me that having it in eBook form while reading it aroundtown might not be the worst thing in the world. (However, that particular book isn't available onKindle or Sony's E-Reader . The sequel, however, is.) So I'm both intrigued and wary of electronic
books. Personally, I won't be happy until every new book I buy comes with a free eBook. But I can
see the appeal and wanted to find out for myself.
IS IT LIKE READING A BOOK? -- Yep, it is. I found the Kindle 2.0 very easy to read, with no
discernible difference in eye strain or the like whether reading a Kindle or a print edition.
Personally, I found the leather cover essential for reading. (And $30 for something that reallyshould come for free with the $360.00 Kindle 2.0 is annoying.) Even when I "folded" the coverback (something I would never do on a print edition), I needed that cover to hold and feelcomfortable while reading. The heft of the Kindle was nice, solid but not too heavy. This is not a
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]side by side comparison, but the brief time I spent playing with the Sony E-Reader (which has a
backlight and a touch screen) was no comparison, even though they use the same technology. The
thick screen necessary for touch technology made the E-Reader far less reader friendly. And the
iPhone? Please. Reading a book on the iPhone is highly impractical. I use it to read the occasional
Shakespearean sonnet or some other poetry, but that's as far as it can go.
IS THE KINDLE 2.0 A BIG JUMP ON THE 1.0? -- Oh yes. Strangely, a lot of the reviews
described the 2.0 as just tweaking the design of the 1.0. I disagree strongly. The Kindle 1.0, to me,
was always very junky and cheap feeling. The buttons for advancing pages were poorly designed,with the biggest complaint being that anyone just trying to hold the device invariably flipped thepages by accident. That problem is completely removed with the 2.0 which is much sleeker andnicer than the original. The page buttons are press-able on the inside only, almost to a fault. It'sactually a tad difficult to change pages, which is definitely an improvement on too easy. Perhaps asmall raised button on the inside would make it more tactile and user-friendly? The keyboardlooks much nicer and the look overall is much, much better. This feels like a real device, not a toy.I'd be happy to keep it around and show it off. However, I can't keep a comment by David Pogue ofthe New York Times out of my head: he said it looked like it was designed by the people who didthe Commodore 64 . Ouch. Not quite fair for the new Kindle but really: would it kill them to make
it available in black and other colors? White is about the least friendly color for a device you'regoing to be handling all the time.
IS WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY A BIG DEAL? -- Before I used it, the Whispernet function of
the Kindle 2.0 seemed a little silly. What's the big deal about plugging in a Kindle to your computer
when you want a new book? I do it with my iPod, right? But I had to admit, this feature wassurprisingly nice. There's something almost sinfully easy about lying in bed late at night with yourKindle, thinking about a book you want to read and a few seconds later you've found it, purchasedit, and begun reading. The free first chapter offer (available for seemingly any book at the Kindlestore) is also tempting. To me, it's still not a big negative in other devices to have to hook up to acomputer to purchase and download a book. But the breeze of constant connectivity is a biggerpositive than I imagined.
HOW ABOUT GETTING YOUR OWN DOCUMENTS ONTO THE KINDLE? -- Sight
unseen, I was very adamantly opposed to the way the Kindle works this. If you have a Word or PDF
document you want to carry around on your Kindle, you have to email it to the Kindle people whothen download it onto your personal device. Privacy be damned, of course. This annoyed the heckout of me in theory. In practice? Not so much. It worked easily and almost as quickly as buying anew book on the Kindle. Several articles and blogs I'd written came to the Kindle in Word formatsand were easily read.
CAN YOU BUY ALL THE BESTSELLERS? -- Yes, you can. This is true of Kindle 2.0 and the
Sony E-Reader. Today, I went through the Top 15 New York Times bestsellers in fiction and
nonfiction. Both devices had every title available, with one exception: the Sony E-Reader did nothave the nonfiction title Inside The Revolution available, while Kindle did. And neither device had
the new John Grisham, who must be a technophobe. What you can't do with the Kindle (or theSony E-Reader) is just name books you want to read and find them. Current releases are availableand the obvious classic titles ( The Three Musketeers, Wuthering Heights and the like). But many,
many catalog titles are not. Kindle may have 250,000 titles available but publishers put out thatmany books every two years, so there are a LOT of gaps to fill. I looked for the massive two volumeWinston Churchill biography The Last Lion but it wasn't available. However, Churchill's own
acclaimed history of World War II is. I looked for Dreadnought , that doorstop of a book and it's
not available (and neither is most anything else by this best-selling historian EXCEPT the sequel toDreadnought , which is available.)
HOW EXPENSIVE ARE THE EBOOKS? -- Kindle has got most everything at $10 or less, with
exceptions of course. (They're all detailed at Amazon, as well as the Kindle online store, whichdoes NOT include the readers comments from Amazon.) Sony E-Reader's store has titles morecommonly at $11, which is $2 more than Kindle. There's a lot of variability in pricing, though, withKindle generally cheaper. You can buy Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's The Yankee Years for $17.61
on sale in hardcover at Amazon or you can get it at the Sony eBook store for $18.87 (bizarrely, it'sMORE expensive than the hardcover) or you can get it on Kindle for $10. Prices are set by
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]publishers and not the device sellers, of course. I have to say, the cheaper Kindle editions -- as
compared to hardcovers -- were appealing. Publishers really do have to follow the Thomas Nelsonlead and make ebook and audio book versions available for free when you buy a hardcover OR apaperback. The Doris Kearns Goodwin title Team Of Rivals is $21 in paperback -- I know it's a
thick book, but my God, isn't that expensive? The Sony e-version is $14 and the Kindle is $10 butI'd much prefer to buy the paperback (or hardcover) and get a download for free. Why not? Onceyou've set up the edition as a digital download, making it available is super cheap. Forcing peopleto choose which version they want (which is like making people choose whether they want to beable to play the CD they purchase ONLY in their car or ONLY at home or ONLY on theircomputer) is just crazy and will push them into embracing pirate versions.
WHAT ABOUT THAT COMPUTERIZED READING VOICE OPTION? -- Publishers are
idiots to demand Kindle give them the option of turning off this feature on select titles. A
computerized voice reads the text for you in a mechanical, but not bad manner. It's not a genuine
audiobook, in which someone really performs the text or at least lets you hear the author speak. It's
just a computerized transcription, just like people already have available on their computers. I
thought it would be dumb, but there are moments maybe when shaving or cooking breakfast you
might want to keep hearing something you're looking at, especially if it's an owner's manual or
some text from work, as opposed to Great Expectations. And editions for the blind take FOREVER
to come out and aren't available for many titles, so removing this option is obnoxious for those who
might make use of it. Speaking of impaired vision, the ability to increase the size of the text is
terrific for older people.
WHAT ABOUT CLASSIC TITLES? ARE THEY FREE OR CHEAP? -- I was a little surprised
to find free editions of some classic titles (Sherlock Holmes, etc.) on the Kindle store. And of
course Google has raised the bar with its deal with Sony. I can't think of any reason why they
wouldn't work out the same details and make the same titles available to Kindle down the road,
though no one is talking. But there are also many publishers making public domain titles available
in extremely cheap sets. I bought the complete Charles Dickens for $5; Mark Twain for $4, Balzac
for $5, a handful of Trollope for $4 and so on. With $30 to play with, I filled my Kindle with
literally hundreds of classic and new titles. Shakespeare is a different beast: I've yet to find a free
or cheap edition that presented the plays nicely. (Getting the line-breaks right ain't easy,
apparently.) You can also find lots of websites with free downloads of public domain titles in
Kindle or E-Reader friendly versions. But I'm a clumsy tech guy and tried a couple of them and
couldn't find any that came up properly on the Kindle. I'm certain this will get easier and -- again --Google (with their call for free content on any platform and any device) will surely make their500,000 and counting public domain titles available in Kindle friendly versions as well that willwork.
IS IT THE IPOD OF ELECTRONIC BOOKS? -- No, for one simple reason: you can't put all
your books on it for free. The iPod was backward compatible; any CDs you owned could be rippedand placed on it immediately. Oh if only that were true of the Kindle. If only you could, say, scanyour UPC code and show you own a title and get an electronic version of every book you own onthe Kindle for free. I'd buy one immediately. But you can't. And when you buy a new book, in mostcases you have to decide in advance whether you want a hardcover or wait one year for a paperbackor a more expensive audio version or a cheaper ebook version. This must change, in my mind, forthese electronic books to become widespread.
WHO SHOULD BUY THE KINDLE? -- If you travel a lot and like the classics or have lots of
disposable income and don't mind buying the cheap ebook versions of new titles you may already
own or want in a print edition, the Kindle is very tempting. It reads terrifically well, it's lightweightand portable and easy to use and you can fill it up with classics very, very cheaply. If you're like meand worry about running out of reading material, the Kindle is ideal. You can bring two books andthe Kindle and be set for the weekend or a month, frankly, without any anxiety. If you're old andhave poor eyesight, the ability to have de facto large print editions of classics and new bestsellers isgreat. However, if you have eclectic tastes and expect to find any title you're looking for availableon the Kindle, you'll get frustrated. Browsing the Kindle store to find titles to read is fun. Butlooking for a particular book that came out 10 or 20 years ago is frustrating since half the time it'snot available. I found it telling when I was looking for some acclaimed authors who have wonawards and hit the bestseller lists but are still "midlist" as opposed to perennial bestsellers likeJohn Updike. Padgett Powell? None. Peter Taylor? None. Mark Helprin? One. Edmund White?Four, but mostly minor works and none of his acknowledged classics. Steven Millhauser? His threemost recent only. By the way, John Updike is no better, really. I found only eight books, amishmash of mostly recent releases and none of the Rabbit books. And so it goes. This situationwill improve with time (and with the number of people who actually buy these electronic books).
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]
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At 33But for the moment it's a lot easier to find books NOT available than it is ones that are. Again,
however, all the classics are there for free or in extremely cheap editions and new releases seem to
be available as a matter of course.
To sum up, I loved playing with the Kindle and would love one for free and would love to get free
ebooks and audio books every time I buy a print edition (or get the option of just the ebook or
audio book at a severe discount). It reads very easily without any eyestrain whatsoever; I felt like I
was reading a book whereas reading on an iPhone or a computer is just a gimmick. The Kindle is
indeed a genuine alternative to a print edition and not just a toy. But for the moment, I won't buy
it. Here are some suggested changes.
1. $200 with a leather cover and a bigger screen would be more enticing. The screen should
contain all the info on a standard mass market paperback page. That's the standard they must set
for themselves. Otherwise you're flipping pages every 30 seconds.
2. Free web surfing makes sense too. Paying to read newspapers you can access free online is
ridiculous.
3. They need more colors available for the exterior of the model; a color screen is far less important
to me.
4. They need to get rid of the keyboard or at least offer an edition that comes without the
keyboard. Personally, I never write in books or take notes so the keyboard is pointless except whenshopping or searching the text and in those contexts an onscreen keyboard is fine.
5. Navigation is a little clumsy at times. When you're in the store, the Kindle takes you to the top of
the page and you have to scroll down through new releases and bestsellers and recommendations
and so on to get to the section where you can type in an author. Trying to toggle up to jump from
the top to the bottom doesn't work. Other minor roadblocks like that popped up.
6. The "page forward" and "back" buttons are almost TOO hard to press. You get used to it but they
should tweak that more.
7. Kindle needs to woo Google and get a deal done quickly; those 500,000 public domain titles are
awfully tempting.
8. Similarly, the Kindle should come loaded with say 100+ classics like Dickens and Twain and
Shakespeare and Austen.
9. The Kindle store should have a section for free downloads, just like they do for mystery and
science fiction and so on.
10. And do this FAST. I'm not ready to buy an electronic book but I will be very surprised if I don't
have one in the next five years.
If you have any questions about the Kindle, ask away and I'll try to answer them. Do you own an
eBook of any sort? Have you played with one? Let me know what you think.
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
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azteacher See Profile I'm a Fan of azteacher permalink
As a Kindle 2.0 lover, I really enjoyed this article. The only disagreement I found is that free web surfing
is already available on the Kindle 2.0. It's not a very advanced internet system, but you can do all of the
basics! I heart my Kindle!
Michael Giltz See Profile I'm a Fan of Michael Giltz permalink
I found the web access area. But it's so clumsy and stripped down, I feel like it barely counts.
How many titles do you have on your Kindle? And do you just buy ebooks or have youbought something in print and a Kindle version because you want a copy to keep but like theease of the e-version?
Michael Giltz See Profile I'm a Fan of Michael Giltz permalink
Thx for reading. How do you access the internet? I'm looking at the menu and home pagesand don't see it. And why would anyone pay for a subscription to the New York Times if they
could go online and read it for free?
onceler See Profile I'm a Fan of onceler permalink
But now that the iPhone has a Kindle app, isn't the Kindle already obsolete?
And for the love of Yaweh, can they cut about $150 off the price?Seriously, they have been selling similar devices for children's learning purposes for years that have a
little less capacity but are under $80 or so.
For $360, just keep saving, get a laptop, and 'read' off of that.
jl4141 See Profile I'm a Fan of jl4141 permalink
Did you even read the article before posting this? Glitz addressed the shortcomings of the
iPhone and the high price, among other concerns. And reading off a laptop? Yeah, that'll fitnicely into your jacket pocket.
BTW, it's "Yahwey," not "Yawey." You could look it up.
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Michael Giltz
Freelance writer and raconteur
Posted March 30, 2009 | 03:39 PM (EST)
BIO
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Bloggers' Index
Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
Read More: Amazon , Books , E-Reader , Electronic Books , Kindle ,
Public Domain , Sony , Entertainment News
Most of the reviews of the Kindle 2.0 had to be
thrown together by people who spent a few hoursplaying with them on deadline. I decided tospend some two weeks with my very firstelectronic book device to really get a feel for itand see what it was like.
Clearly, electronic books are going to be around
in one form or another and the news has beencoming fast and furious since Kindle 2.0 came
out. There's an app for the iPhone, publisher Thomas Nelson is offering a free ebook and audiobook for everyone who buys a hardcover from them on select new titles (this is the wave of thefuture in my mind), Google is offering 500,000 public domain titles in easy to use formats for theSony E-Reader, Fujitsu is selling a color electronic book in Japan for $1000 and on and on and on.
So here's my take on the Kindle 2.0. I'm an aggressive book reader and collector and will surely die
surrounded by hardcovers and paperbacks. I read probably 100+ books a year, as well asnewspapers and magazines and blogs and the such. I can't imagine not holding a "real" book in myhand. However, I travel a lot and sometimes find my luggage weighed down with books I mightwant to read (and books I buy overseas). I also commute a lot on trains and buses. Recently I waslugging around Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie, a 900 page monster about the naval arms race
before World War I and it did occur to me that having it in eBook form while reading it aroundtown might not be the worst thing in the world. (However, that particular book isn't available onKindle or Sony's E-Reader . The sequel, however, is.) So I'm both intrigued and wary of electronic
books. Personally, I won't be happy until every new book I buy comes with a free eBook. But I can
see the appeal and wanted to find out for myself.
IS IT LIKE READING A BOOK? -- Yep, it is. I found the Kindle 2.0 very easy to read, with no
discernible difference in eye strain or the like whether reading a Kindle or a print edition.
Personally, I found the leather cover essential for reading. (And $30 for something that reallyshould come for free with the $360.00 Kindle 2.0 is annoying.) Even when I "folded" the coverback (something I would never do on a print edition), I needed that cover to hold and feelcomfortable while reading. The heft of the Kindle was nice, solid but not too heavy. This is not a
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]side by side comparison, but the brief time I spent playing with the Sony E-Reader (which has a
backlight and a touch screen) was no comparison, even though they use the same technology. The
thick screen necessary for touch technology made the E-Reader far less reader friendly. And the
iPhone? Please. Reading a book on the iPhone is highly impractical. I use it to read the occasional
Shakespearean sonnet or some other poetry, but that's as far as it can go.
IS THE KINDLE 2.0 A BIG JUMP ON THE 1.0? -- Oh yes. Strangely, a lot of the reviews
described the 2.0 as just tweaking the design of the 1.0. I disagree strongly. The Kindle 1.0, to me,
was always very junky and cheap feeling. The buttons for advancing pages were poorly designed,with the biggest complaint being that anyone just trying to hold the device invariably flipped thepages by accident. That problem is completely removed with the 2.0 which is much sleeker andnicer than the original. The page buttons are press-able on the inside only, almost to a fault. It'sactually a tad difficult to change pages, which is definitely an improvement on too easy. Perhaps asmall raised button on the inside would make it more tactile and user-friendly? The keyboardlooks much nicer and the look overall is much, much better. This feels like a real device, not a toy.I'd be happy to keep it around and show it off. However, I can't keep a comment by David Pogue ofthe New York Times out of my head: he said it looked like it was designed by the people who didthe Commodore 64 . Ouch. Not quite fair for the new Kindle but really: would it kill them to make
it available in black and other colors? White is about the least friendly color for a device you'regoing to be handling all the time.
IS WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY A BIG DEAL? -- Before I used it, the Whispernet function of
the Kindle 2.0 seemed a little silly. What's the big deal about plugging in a Kindle to your computer
when you want a new book? I do it with my iPod, right? But I had to admit, this feature wassurprisingly nice. There's something almost sinfully easy about lying in bed late at night with yourKindle, thinking about a book you want to read and a few seconds later you've found it, purchasedit, and begun reading. The free first chapter offer (available for seemingly any book at the Kindlestore) is also tempting. To me, it's still not a big negative in other devices to have to hook up to acomputer to purchase and download a book. But the breeze of constant connectivity is a biggerpositive than I imagined.
HOW ABOUT GETTING YOUR OWN DOCUMENTS ONTO THE KINDLE? -- Sight
unseen, I was very adamantly opposed to the way the Kindle works this. If you have a Word or PDF
document you want to carry around on your Kindle, you have to email it to the Kindle people whothen download it onto your personal device. Privacy be damned, of course. This annoyed the heckout of me in theory. In practice? Not so much. It worked easily and almost as quickly as buying anew book on the Kindle. Several articles and blogs I'd written came to the Kindle in Word formatsand were easily read.
CAN YOU BUY ALL THE BESTSELLERS? -- Yes, you can. This is true of Kindle 2.0 and the
Sony E-Reader. Today, I went through the Top 15 New York Times bestsellers in fiction and
nonfiction. Both devices had every title available, with one exception: the Sony E-Reader did nothave the nonfiction title Inside The Revolution available, while Kindle did. And neither device had
the new John Grisham, who must be a technophobe. What you can't do with the Kindle (or theSony E-Reader) is just name books you want to read and find them. Current releases are availableand the obvious classic titles ( The Three Musketeers, Wuthering Heights and the like). But many,
many catalog titles are not. Kindle may have 250,000 titles available but publishers put out thatmany books every two years, so there are a LOT of gaps to fill. I looked for the massive two volumeWinston Churchill biography The Last Lion but it wasn't available. However, Churchill's own
acclaimed history of World War II is. I looked for Dreadnought , that doorstop of a book and it's
not available (and neither is most anything else by this best-selling historian EXCEPT the sequel toDreadnought , which is available.)
HOW EXPENSIVE ARE THE EBOOKS? -- Kindle has got most everything at $10 or less, with
exceptions of course. (They're all detailed at Amazon, as well as the Kindle online store, whichdoes NOT include the readers comments from Amazon.) Sony E-Reader's store has titles morecommonly at $11, which is $2 more than Kindle. There's a lot of variability in pricing, though, withKindle generally cheaper. You can buy Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's The Yankee Years for $17.61
on sale in hardcover at Amazon or you can get it at the Sony eBook store for $18.87 (bizarrely, it'sMORE expensive than the hardcover) or you can get it on Kindle for $10. Prices are set by
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]publishers and not the device sellers, of course. I have to say, the cheaper Kindle editions -- as
compared to hardcovers -- were appealing. Publishers really do have to follow the Thomas Nelsonlead and make ebook and audio book versions available for free when you buy a hardcover OR apaperback. The Doris Kearns Goodwin title Team Of Rivals is $21 in paperback -- I know it's a
thick book, but my God, isn't that expensive? The Sony e-version is $14 and the Kindle is $10 butI'd much prefer to buy the paperback (or hardcover) and get a download for free. Why not? Onceyou've set up the edition as a digital download, making it available is super cheap. Forcing peopleto choose which version they want (which is like making people choose whether they want to beable to play the CD they purchase ONLY in their car or ONLY at home or ONLY on theircomputer) is just crazy and will push them into embracing pirate versions.
WHAT ABOUT THAT COMPUTERIZED READING VOICE OPTION? -- Publishers are
idiots to demand Kindle give them the option of turning off this feature on select titles. A
computerized voice reads the text for you in a mechanical, but not bad manner. It's not a genuine
audiobook, in which someone really performs the text or at least lets you hear the author speak. It's
just a computerized transcription, just like people already have available on their computers. I
thought it would be dumb, but there are moments maybe when shaving or cooking breakfast you
might want to keep hearing something you're looking at, especially if it's an owner's manual or
some text from work, as opposed to Great Expectations. And editions for the blind take FOREVER
to come out and aren't available for many titles, so removing this option is obnoxious for those who
might make use of it. Speaking of impaired vision, the ability to increase the size of the text is
terrific for older people.
WHAT ABOUT CLASSIC TITLES? ARE THEY FREE OR CHEAP? -- I was a little surprised
to find free editions of some classic titles (Sherlock Holmes, etc.) on the Kindle store. And of
course Google has raised the bar with its deal with Sony. I can't think of any reason why they
wouldn't work out the same details and make the same titles available to Kindle down the road,
though no one is talking. But there are also many publishers making public domain titles available
in extremely cheap sets. I bought the complete Charles Dickens for $5; Mark Twain for $4, Balzac
for $5, a handful of Trollope for $4 and so on. With $30 to play with, I filled my Kindle with
literally hundreds of classic and new titles. Shakespeare is a different beast: I've yet to find a free
or cheap edition that presented the plays nicely. (Getting the line-breaks right ain't easy,
apparently.) You can also find lots of websites with free downloads of public domain titles in
Kindle or E-Reader friendly versions. But I'm a clumsy tech guy and tried a couple of them and
couldn't find any that came up properly on the Kindle. I'm certain this will get easier and -- again --Google (with their call for free content on any platform and any device) will surely make their500,000 and counting public domain titles available in Kindle friendly versions as well that willwork.
IS IT THE IPOD OF ELECTRONIC BOOKS? -- No, for one simple reason: you can't put all
your books on it for free. The iPod was backward compatible; any CDs you owned could be rippedand placed on it immediately. Oh if only that were true of the Kindle. If only you could, say, scanyour UPC code and show you own a title and get an electronic version of every book you own onthe Kindle for free. I'd buy one immediately. But you can't. And when you buy a new book, in mostcases you have to decide in advance whether you want a hardcover or wait one year for a paperbackor a more expensive audio version or a cheaper ebook version. This must change, in my mind, forthese electronic books to become widespread.
WHO SHOULD BUY THE KINDLE? -- If you travel a lot and like the classics or have lots of
disposable income and don't mind buying the cheap ebook versions of new titles you may already
own or want in a print edition, the Kindle is very tempting. It reads terrifically well, it's lightweightand portable and easy to use and you can fill it up with classics very, very cheaply. If you're like meand worry about running out of reading material, the Kindle is ideal. You can bring two books andthe Kindle and be set for the weekend or a month, frankly, without any anxiety. If you're old andhave poor eyesight, the ability to have de facto large print editions of classics and new bestsellers isgreat. However, if you have eclectic tastes and expect to find any title you're looking for availableon the Kindle, you'll get frustrated. Browsing the Kindle store to find titles to read is fun. Butlooking for a particular book that came out 10 or 20 years ago is frustrating since half the time it'snot available. I found it telling when I was looking for some acclaimed authors who have wonawards and hit the bestseller lists but are still "midlist" as opposed to perennial bestsellers likeJohn Updike. Padgett Powell? None. Peter Taylor? None. Mark Helprin? One. Edmund White?Four, but mostly minor works and none of his acknowledged classics. Steven Millhauser? His threemost recent only. By the way, John Updike is no better, really. I found only eight books, amishmash of mostly recent releases and none of the Rabbit books. And so it goes. This situationwill improve with time (and with the number of people who actually buy these electronic books).
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]
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At 33But for the moment it's a lot easier to find books NOT available than it is ones that are. Again,
however, all the classics are there for free or in extremely cheap editions and new releases seem to
be available as a matter of course.
To sum up, I loved playing with the Kindle and would love one for free and would love to get free
ebooks and audio books every time I buy a print edition (or get the option of just the ebook or
audio book at a severe discount). It reads very easily without any eyestrain whatsoever; I felt like I
was reading a book whereas reading on an iPhone or a computer is just a gimmick. The Kindle is
indeed a genuine alternative to a print edition and not just a toy. But for the moment, I won't buy
it. Here are some suggested changes.
1. $200 with a leather cover and a bigger screen would be more enticing. The screen should
contain all the info on a standard mass market paperback page. That's the standard they must set
for themselves. Otherwise you're flipping pages every 30 seconds.
2. Free web surfing makes sense too. Paying to read newspapers you can access free online is
ridiculous.
3. They need more colors available for the exterior of the model; a color screen is far less important
to me.
4. They need to get rid of the keyboard or at least offer an edition that comes without the
keyboard. Personally, I never write in books or take notes so the keyboard is pointless except whenshopping or searching the text and in those contexts an onscreen keyboard is fine.
5. Navigation is a little clumsy at times. When you're in the store, the Kindle takes you to the top of
the page and you have to scroll down through new releases and bestsellers and recommendations
and so on to get to the section where you can type in an author. Trying to toggle up to jump from
the top to the bottom doesn't work. Other minor roadblocks like that popped up.
6. The "page forward" and "back" buttons are almost TOO hard to press. You get used to it but they
should tweak that more.
7. Kindle needs to woo Google and get a deal done quickly; those 500,000 public domain titles are
awfully tempting.
8. Similarly, the Kindle should come loaded with say 100+ classics like Dickens and Twain and
Shakespeare and Austen.
9. The Kindle store should have a section for free downloads, just like they do for mystery and
science fiction and so on.
10. And do this FAST. I'm not ready to buy an electronic book but I will be very surprised if I don't
have one in the next five years.
If you have any questions about the Kindle, ask away and I'll try to answer them. Do you own an
eBook of any sort? Have you played with one? Let me know what you think.
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
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azteacher See Profile I'm a Fan of azteacher permalink
As a Kindle 2.0 lover, I really enjoyed this article. The only disagreement I found is that free web surfing
is already available on the Kindle 2.0. It's not a very advanced internet system, but you can do all of the
basics! I heart my Kindle!
Michael Giltz See Profile I'm a Fan of Michael Giltz permalink
I found the web access area. But it's so clumsy and stripped down, I feel like it barely counts.
How many titles do you have on your Kindle? And do you just buy ebooks or have youbought something in print and a Kindle version because you want a copy to keep but like theease of the e-version?
Michael Giltz See Profile I'm a Fan of Michael Giltz permalink
Thx for reading. How do you access the internet? I'm looking at the menu and home pagesand don't see it. And why would anyone pay for a subscription to the New York Times if they
could go online and read it for free?
onceler See Profile I'm a Fan of onceler permalink
But now that the iPhone has a Kindle app, isn't the Kindle already obsolete?
And for the love of Yaweh, can they cut about $150 off the price?Seriously, they have been selling similar devices for children's learning purposes for years that have a
little less capacity but are under $80 or so.
For $360, just keep saving, get a laptop, and 'read' off of that.
jl4141 See Profile I'm a Fan of jl4141 permalink
Did you even read the article before posting this? Glitz addressed the shortcomings of the
iPhone and the high price, among other concerns. And reading off a laptop? Yeah, that'll fitnicely into your jacket pocket.
BTW, it's "Yahwey," not "Yawey." You could look it up.
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Michael Giltz: Kindle 2.0: The Final Review
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/kindle-20-the-final-revie_b_180834.html [4/2/2009 9:13:07 PM]
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