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By Chris Meadows

image I just returned from seeing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at a 12:05 showing with some friends. (Though, as it happened, I didn’t get to sit with said friends: we thought we were getting there fairly early at 40 minutes before the film started, but it turned out they had been seating for two hours already!)

But I noticed something interesting as I was sidling out to get a water cup from the concession stand: an older couple sitting at the end of the row in front of me. The man had a Kindle; his wife had a Kindle 2. (And, they informed me, if I had been around when their son, who had the aisle seat, was there, that would have made three Kindles in a row!) This was the first chance I had ever seen to take a look at Kindle devices in person.

The couple kindly allowed me to take a closer look at their devices—and while I can’t say I had time for any sort of detailed examination, I was impressed with how much smaller and lighter they seemed than the Sony PRS-700 I had previously examined (though I suspect if I placed them side by side, they would be overall about the same size), and how much clearer their e-ink screens were.

They said they had examined the Sony, but had not been impressed by its features compared to the Kindle. The thing they liked the most, the man said, was the battery life—with the wireless off, they could go a week without recharging. As for what they were reading, the woman was reading Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey (one of my own favorite novels in the Pern series), and the man was reading one of the Wheel of Time books.

Not being iPhone owners, they were not aware of the iPhone Kindle reader app, but were interested when I described the way it would allow picking up on one device from where reading was left off on the other.

I can’t help but find it ironic that the first time I actually came across a Kindle in person—in fact, two different Kindles in person—was at a Harry Potter movie, given Rowling’s piracy-driven opposition to releasing the Potter novels electronically. (Not that this has done anything to prevent or even slow the piracy of said books, which were circulating complete on peer-to-peer within hours of their print releases.)

 
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