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By Joanna

imageI picked up my Amazon Kindle from a local Craigslist seller.

Luckily for me, this gift to her hadn’t worked out. The price was $300, or $65 less than the original buyer had paid with a case and shipping and customs fees added in.

Selling my Sony PRS-505 should bring me $250. Hooray! I’ll be out a mere $50.

No flowers but comfortable to hold

imageThe Kindle is very comfortable to hold in the black leather case. I can fold back the case while reading. The Sony case, the one you see with the flowers, won’t let me.

I love the pictures of authors that the Kindle’s screensaver shows on the E Ink screen. A quick flip of the power switch, and the reader is on.

The five-way controller took a little getting used to. The first thing I did was head into the preferences to register the device. When I tried to get back to the Kindle store after that, I accidentally pressed “un-register this device” and nearly lost all the progress I’d made. I also almost bought two books accidentally. I wanted to get the free sample and couldn’t get the cursor moved down to that button without accidentally pressing the “one click buy” button. Oops! It defaults to the “’buy now” button, so I’ll have to be careful if just browsing.

The lock-in factor: Why I don’t plan to buy many books the Amazon store

I don’t plan to make many purchases from the Amazon store as I have plenty of content from elsewhere right now and am worried about buying content locked to only one device.

But one of my primary motivations for getting this device was the option to use a French dictionary with it. So my first step was purchasing this dictionary, the Merriam-Webster French-English Translation Dictionary (Kindle Edition). It was easy to click on the “buy now” button and get it loaded onto the Kindle. The product description specifically said that it could be used as the Kindle default dictionary, but it did not offer instructions as to how this could be done. I did eventually get it set with preferences, but I was still learning the five-way controller and I am not sure exactly how I got this done!

I had been a bit worried because the reviews for this dictionary were lukewarm and said it had trouble recognizing conjugated forms of verbs, but in the sample texts I tried (two “try a sample” excerpts of French short story collections from the Amazon store) I did not encounter this problem and it recognized every word I tried to look up. Using the dictionary was as nice as I thought it would be.

Within a few minutes, I was adept with the five-way controller and I could just move it to a word and get an instant handy translation of it. I later tested it with a copy of Le Petit Prince from Mobile Read, and again, encountered no problems. I hope this feature will allow me to improve my French reading. One of my goals for the year is to increase the quality of my reading—to read better stuff, rather than just an endless stream of forgettable mysteries. I am a better speaker in French than I am a reader, so I hope the Kindle will bring me closer to my goal of true bilingualism.

I also bought the day’s newspaper. I was considering getting a Kindle subscription and wanted a sample issue to play with, and for 0.99 why not? Reading a paper on the Kindle was an interesting experience. You could browse by section (and get a list of all articles within that section) or read the whole thing straight through. You could also use the five-way controller to instantly move to the next article. I am undecided on whether I will get a subscription. That will be a decision for down the road, I think.

Moving my library: Calibre to the rescue if you’re switching to a Kindle

When I got the device home and plugged it into my Macbook, it was instantly recognized as a drive. I launched Calibre to see what content I could put on it. I have many books from Fictionwise, Mobile Read and other sources. It was easy to transfer them using Calibre but I am still tweaking my conversion settings. HTML looked fine on the Kindle, but my LRF files from past Fictionwise multiformat books did not appear justified on the Kindle, so I will re-download them in the Kindle format later.

On my Sony, my habit had been to pretty much load on every book I own, but I don’t think this will work on the Kindle. The Sony uses tags from Calibre to sort the books into collections; the Kindle does not have this feature and all the books appear in one list. I think it will get unwieldy to have more than a hundred or so files on there at once. On the plus, I had been starting to run out of the room on the Sony. I loaded about 40 books onto the Kindle and still have over 1GB left on it. So I can download all those pretty illustrated books from MobileRead without worrying about their high disk space needs! If only there were folders or tags or something to ease browsing, I truly could put my whole library on there!

Using the Kindle

There are a lot of buttons on the Kindle. In addition to the keyboard, there is a home button, menu button, page turn buttons and more. I thought the keyboard would annoy me, but it turned out to be an advantage when I was reading in bed because when the Kindle was propped up, the rows of buttons on the bottom pushed the screen part up higher so I could see it while lying down. It was very comfortable to read on. I did find it a little odd that the “previous page” button was only on the left side even though the next page button was on both sides; I had to reach over several times to access it, and I think a button for right-handers would have been nice. But this is an interface flaw I can live with.

Finding your books once they are on there is less convenient on the Kindle than on the Sony because you can’t group them or organize them in any way. You can sort your list by author, title or most recently used (your most recent books appear on top) and that’s fine once everything is set up correctly, I guess. But while I was making my initial transfer of books, I had to do some double-checking to see which formats were working out the best, and it bugged me that pressing the home button would always take me back to the FIRST screen, regardless of what screen I had been on previously. For example, if I was checking the books on page 4 of my list and pressed the home button, it would not return me to page 4, but to the very beginning. And I would have to use the next button to go all the way back again.

Once I got going, I found I preferred the “sort by most recent” option because I tend to have more than one book going at once—typically, an English novel, a French novel and a short story collection at minimum. Sometimes I have an issue of a magazine going as well, and right now, I have some materials for a course I am taking. Having them all show up on the first page together is very handy, and I can switch between them without too much navigating. My only complaint is that the Kindle seems to view every dictionary look-up as a use of that book and so keeps moving the dictionary to the top of my file list!

I also found there was one advantage to a system that is not tied to computer software. With my Sony, transferring files could only be done at home because my Calibre library is there, and if I try to plug the reader into a foreign computer, it will attempt to install the Sony software. The Kindle is read like a USB drive and only has one slim cable. So if I am on the go, I can plug it into any computer and charge it or get new content.

My reading experience

The books I tried looked wonderful; much nicer than they did on my Sony. I had an HTML file of content from a course I’m taking, and the conversion to LRF on the Sony did not preserve bolding, underlining and other formatting marks. The conversion to Mobi did, and these files looked fabulous. The default fault is slightly bigger and less computer-looking than on the Sony. All of my HTML files looked great.

I also tried a Mobipocket file from MobileRead. Some of my LRF files from there did not convert with justification, so I wanted to see if a ‘native’ mobi file would have it. It did and I was very impressed with how it looked. I think that when the content is available in that format, it will be worth the extra effort to go seek it out and download it again. I also tried emailing a Word doc to Amazon for conversion. I was not able to download it wirelessly onto my device since this feature is not avilable in Canada, but Amazon emailed me back a file I could transfer via computer.

I then investigated the experimental browser. Since I am Canada, the only website I could access was Wikipedia. All other websites, including that of Amazon.com, were blocked. Wikipedia access was serviceable, if a little on the slow side. I likely won’t use this feature much.

One feature which did greatly interest me (and was my primary motivation for upgrading devices) was the text-to-speech or “read to me” feature. You can access this feature with a keyboard shortcut. There is a noticeable lag when it launches, but once I got it going, it worked splendidly. Occasionally, there would be some slight pronunciation errors, but overall it does a very serviceable job and even non-standard words like character names come out very well.

You can choose between a male voice (which I slightly preferred) or a female voice, and adjust the rate of speed using a menu option. There is perhaps room for improvement (I wonder if Amazon deliberately left it slightly robot-sounding to avoid cannibalizing audio book sales, since they are involved in Audible.com?) but I did not find it unpleasant at all to use this tool to listen to the story.

I do a lot of walking and am happy to reclaim that time for progressing with my current novel. Twice so far, I have been for half hour or longer walks, and the time flies by. And during my morning commute, I can have it read to me as I walk to the bus stop, then stop the voice and resume where I left off while I ride on the bus. Compared to audio books, where all you can do is listen, this is a real innovation. I am not a huge music person, so this feature is a real benefit to me and was the primary reason I upgraded readers.

The only difficulty I had was that hitting the menu button or space bar accidentally will pause the reading. If you keep the Kindle in a shoulder bag, or hold it upside down, you can minimize this danger.

Compared to other readers

The Kindle is not my first ebook reader, so how does it compare to ones I have tried before? Size-wise, it is a tad on the big and clunky side, which was a disappointment. The big-and-clunky issue was the primary reason I got rid of the eBookwise. But going from the specs, it’s only an ounce heavier than the Sony 505.

One thing I liked about the otherwise meh Astak Pocket Pro was its lightness. I do still plan to sell the 505, but if the price of ebook readers continues to fall and I can pick up a mini-sized one somewhere, I might get a second reader as a companion to this one.

I have a lot of “little” content like back issues of magazine subscriptions from Fictionwise that I could not be bothered to load onto the tag-less, folder-less Kindle. I’ve left them on the Sony for now, and will read them there and delete them as I finish, but the Sony might be worth more to me as a sellable item to subsidize my Kindle cost than as a back-up reader per se. Might be worth picking up an eSlick from Fictionwise since the micropay credit for books will make that investment minimally costly. Compared to something the the Astak Pocket Pro, the Kindle is a veritable behemoth!

I do prefer the Sony’s library management features. I like being able to browse by “mystery” or “’sci-fi” or something like that, and so far, I miss having this option. I think they are aiming the Kindle at people who want to manage things without using a PC, so I can understand why this feature is missing. But given that it has the capacity for over 1000 books, I can’t even fathom how they expect you to navigate that size of library without being able to sort them somehow!

Of the devices I have tried so far, the Sony wins the prize. The Pocket Pro did allow folder collections, but if you wanted something to be part of more than one collection in such a scenario, you’d have to copy it twice. One aspect of library management where the Kindle did excel was in deleting content. On the Sony, this involved many button clicks over several screens. On the Pocket Pro, you could not do it at all without hooking it up to a PC. On the Kindle, just nudge the controller to the left and click down to confirm. Easy!

Most of my books are either multiformat titles from Fictionwise (which I have been able to re-download in device-specific formats for every device I have owned) or converted HTML for books where I have extracted the text from another format and done my own saving. All of these looked nicest on either the eBookwise or the Kindle—big, bright and not computer-looking. On my Sony, most of them looked like one was reading a Word document on a smaller screen. On the Kindle, they look more elegant. I think the Kindle has a slightly nicer screen as well. Page turn was noticeably faster (the flicker has gotten more laborious on my Sony over time) and the screen was crisper, with a better contract than the Pocket Pro.

I think that if Amazon ever comes out with a mini-Kindle which is Pocket Pro sized, has fewer buttons (perhaps the alphabet keys can be combined, cell phone-style) and half the weight, it would be a killer device and I would be interested in acquiring it as a companion to the one I have now.

Overall verdict

The Kindle seems to be a very powerful device and in my day with it so far, I have only scratched the surface in features and in ways to use it and enjoy it. I only just figured out that some of the commands have keyboard shortcuts, and the five way controller seems to do interesting things depending on the context. I’ll need time to get used to it and learn how to use it well. My first impression though? This is a fabulous, game-changing power device. All the hype was justified. I bought it for the on-board dictionary and the text to speech, and I will use these features, often, to read more and to read better things. This will be a very, very worthy purchase for me.

Related, by Ficbot: The Astak Pocket Pro: First impressions—and why I’ll go with a Kindle instead.

 
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