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Kindle: Reasons for Not Falling in Love

August 15, 2010 •

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…

Trackbacks

  1. Storytelling Business Social Media Marketing PR & Technology Curated Stories August 16, 2010 says:
    August 16, 2010 at 2:26 pm

    […] Kin­dle: Rea­sons for Not Falling in Love Pub­lished: August 15, 2010 Source: Mus­ings of a Mar­ket­ing Maven As a new owner of a Kin­dle DX, I was really hop­ing to fall in love. We’re on the verge of head­ing to Cape Cod for a fam­ily vaca­tion, so I was look­ing for­ward to car­ry­ing my per­sonal library i… […]

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Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

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Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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