Kindle: Reasons for Not Falling in Love

As a new owner of a Kin­dle DX, I was really hop­ing to fall in love. But it didn’t hap­pen. Here’s why.

I bought a Kin­dle DX just before a fam­ily vaca­tion, and was look­ing for­ward to car­ry­ing my library in a highly portable 1-pound pack­age.

Friends have been singing Kindle’s praises for sev­eral years. The recent advances in screen sharp­ness and con­trast per­suaded me that the time had finally come to buy a Kin­dle for myself. So a week ago I bought the lat­est DX model, one that offers a 9.7” screen and a 50% improve­ment in con­trast.

At over $400 with tax, this larger Kin­dle is quite expen­sive, so I expected a lot from it. Per­haps too much. In the end I returned it, for a vari­ety of func­tional and aes­thetic rea­sons.

Given its price I felt Kin­dle had to become, if not my pri­mary read­ing medium, at least one that I’d be will­ing to use on a reg­u­lar and fre­quent basis. So I decided to test it out, to see if it might become my pre­ferred read­ing device, or an away-from-home alter­na­tive that would be more con­ve­nient than car­ry­ing printed books.

My Issues with the Kindle DX

Practical, Not Lovable

If you love the UI of an iPhone, the Kindle’s inter­face seems klunky and dated. It’s util­i­tar­ian, and gets the job done — but doesn’t leave you feel­ing delighted. For­tu­nately, it takes lit­tle time to learn.

I was never able to fig­ure out how to delete unwanted books or sam­ples, or how to orga­nize things into col­lec­tions. (Or even if those fea­tures are avail­able.)

I did suc­cess­fully trans­fer a PDF from my Mac to the Kin­dle; how­ever, I did not like the fact that there was no easy zoom­ing or scal­ing func­tion that would enable me to resize the PDF page to fit within a sin­gle Kin­dle screen. If this fea­ture exists within the Kindle’s UI, it’s hid­den some­where.

Not Easy on the Eyes

Over the course of a week I used my Kin­dle for a min­i­mum of 30 min­utes at a time, at mul­ti­ple times dur­ing the day and in vary­ing light­ing con­di­tions. Despite the vaunted improve­ments in screen con­trast, in every case I had to put on “com­puter glasses” to see the screen clearly.

I don’t wear glasses to read books or mag­a­zines. That said, I was unable to work with the Kin­dle for more than a few moments with­out putting on glasses.

Even with the glasses I suf­fered some degree of eye strain every time I read from the Kin­dle for more than 30 min­utes. (I read printed books for hours at a time with no ill effects.) After read­ing from the Kin­dle, I almost always expe­ri­enced eye strain, fol­lowed by a mild headache.

There’s no option to man­age con­trast or bright­ness, so if the set­ting doesn’t work opti­mally for you, there’s noth­ing you can do about it. Although my friends don’t com­ment on this, my hus­band com­plained about eye strain after read­ing a mag­a­zine for an hour or so…

Design Limitations

No Typog­ra­phy. As some­one who loves the look and feel of a well-designed book, I strug­gled with Kindle’s lim­ited fea­ture set when it comes to page design and lay­out. Although you can vary the size of the char­ac­ters, there’s only one font. There­fore all books look the same.

Unlike web browsers, where you can change the default serif and sans serif type choices, the Kin­dle sup­ports a sin­gle type­face. The font is nicely designed, but it becomes bor­ing after a while.

Hav­ing said that, the char­ac­ter shapes are crisp and clear. I sus­pect this is the best that Kin­dle can dis­play for this gen­er­a­tion device.

No kern­ing or word spac­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, for books laid out with a jus­ti­fied right mar­gin, Kindle’s prim­i­tive word spac­ing pro­duces rivers of white space down the col­umn of text. I found all this white space between words to be dis­tract­ing. Sadly, this seems to be the most com­mon design for­mat, at least for the books I tried.

Man­u­script-style page lay­outs. It’s also clear that Kin­dle is opti­mized for sim­ple mass mar­ket paper­backs.

If the Kin­dle is able to ren­der pages designed with side­bar con­tent, the mark-up struc­ture must be too incon­ve­nient for pub­lish­ers to use.

As a result my husband’s and my expe­ri­ences read­ing peri­od­i­cal mate­r­ial were quite dis­ap­point­ing. We saw text only, no side­bars, no images in con­text. We didn’t see teaser arti­cles. Instead you have to scroll through all the arti­cles sequen­tially in order to decide which ones to read.

Hav­ing said that, we were read­ing niche pub­li­ca­tions, like sail­ing mag­a­zines and Le Monde. Per­haps some mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers are invest­ing the time to opti­mize their pub­li­ca­tions for Kin­dle; if so, we did not hap­pen to down­load any of their sam­ples.

When­ever my hus­band and I read peri­od­i­cals, we found each article’s side­bars inserted within the main text col­umn — mak­ing side­bars far less effec­tive at sup­ply­ing sup­ple­men­tary infor­ma­tion or per­spec­tives.

Only 16 shades of grey. There’s no color, and only 16 shades of grey. That means design­ers have few options for orga­niz­ing books or mag­a­zines using a “visual lan­guage.” Again, this leaves the impres­sion that you’re read­ing man­u­scripts — because even today’s paper­backs fea­ture sub­tle grey-scale design ele­ments to dis­tin­guish chap­ter heads or sec­tion dividers… I missed that kind of design finesse in books ported to the Kin­dle.

Early Days

Kindle’s cur­rent lim­i­ta­tions remind me of the very early days of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, back in the mid-1980s when laser print­ers had lim­ited out­put capa­bil­i­ties, and peo­ple printed right-jus­ti­fied books or peri­od­i­cals using MS Word or prim­i­tive pub­lish­ing tools…

I imag­ine that Kindle’s screen ren­der­ing capa­bil­i­ties will some­day over­come these lim­i­ta­tions, at a rea­son­able price point, but that time is prob­a­bly years off.

Apple’s iPad is an obvi­ous alter­na­tive to try; how­ever, some of my geeky friends say eye strain will occur with iPads too.

After this expe­ri­ence I’m not rush­ing out to buy one…