Kindle II
March 3rd, 2009, 1:48am by Jake
This seems to be getting some conversation lately. Just bought a Kindle for Mom
s birthday, and she digs it. Even the lousy web browsing capability is nice since she doesn’t have any other portable web access. I set up bookmarks for a few websites (Yahoo! Mail, NY Times) and got her the Kindle Download Guide. If you don’t have that yet, get it– hundreds or thousands of free classics, from The Origin of Species to Tom Sawyer. But yeah, as a book reader it’s really nice. Text is crisp, easy to read, and it’s easy to use. Now that most of the Pyslent readership has at least used a Kindle, so what are your thoughts? We’ve talked about this recently and when it was announced.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:11 am
Serena got one recently as a gift! She likes it a lot, already finished her first book. It’s very nice way to read, and I think the web browser is actually kinda charming.
Thanks for the link to the free books — looks great. I think it’s disappointing that you can’t gift books to Kindle owners. Seems like a you should have that ability.
BTW, this picture is awesome considering it was taken by a camera phone (Samsung Saga from Verizon). Granted, it’s a bit overexposed, so it wouldn’t be a “save” … 🙂
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:33 am
So the site that serves up the Kindle download guide seems to be down. Any chance you can email us the file, if you still have it handy?
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 am
No, Mom’s staying at a hotel tonight and flying out in the morning. There are probably copies flying around the web. As for the photo– it is good, and only overexposed because there is so much dynamic range in the shot. You’d probably need some clever lighting to get those keys to show up well. Granted, I’ve seen better shots, but yeah, good showing for a camera phone!
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:31 am
We bought my mom a first-gen Kindle as a retirement present, and she absolutely loves it. It’s great for reading, but I don’t think she’s pushed the envelope on wireless browsing, etc. She’s an avid reader, so she loves that she can carry several books at once, especially on a trip. To me, one of the interesting-sounding features is the newspaper/magazine subscriptions. But they’re kind of expensive, I think.
From what I’ve read about the new version, it sounds like they’ve made some definite improvements, particularly ok the buttons on the side that advanced the pages. Glad my mom doesn’t read the tech blogs, or she’d probably be wanting a new one!
As for gifting, we just give gift cards.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Right on cue, Kindle for iPhone has been released.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:50 am
That’s kind of a nice supplement for owners of both devices, especially with the way your place is sync’ed. You could get in a few paragraphs in unexpected places, like at a grocery store line or something. But would it be worthwhile to buy a Kindle book for reading exclusively on an iPhone, if you didn’t also own a Kindle?
March 4th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Twittered about this, but I downloaded the iPhone app, and wanted to go for the Download Guide to get some free content. No dice — Safari on iPhone doesn’t support .mobi file downloads, and there’s no browser built into the Kindle iPhone app.
Looks like the Kindle app is designed only for Amazon downloads — not too surprising, but not all that useful overall for me. While it’s good for reading emails, news feeds, and web pages, the iPhone isn’t a good device for any long-term reading.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
The appeal of books for Kindle is that at least for now, it’s more fun to read on the Kindle than actual printed books. Maybe it’s just the novelty of it. But I don’t see reading on the iPhone as having the same attraction. Absent that, I can’t imagine people buying ebooks for their iPhones as long as the printed versions are roughly the same price. Amazon really oughta find a way to bundle the Kindle version along with a print copy for the same price. While they are at it, they should throw in the audio version (or at least, allow Kindle to “read” it out loud).
Can you test the Kindle reader with any free content? Does it work any differently fundamentally than reading a text file on Safari? I think a right-to-left swipe really should flip the page, rather than the standard up and down scrolling.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
So question about books on the iPhone Kindle… if you email stuff to your Kindle for Amazon to convert it (at 10 cents a pop), will that stuff show up on the iPhone? If so, might be a workaround to get the guide onto the Kindle.
That said, I think Amazon is making a mistake if they don’t make it easy to get ALL content onto their iPhone app. It makes the whole platform more valuable, which will inevitably lead to more hardware & software sales. Otherwise, it’s doesn’t even have a chance at being a game changer.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
The guys over at PreCentral give their take on the Kindle for iPhone and speculate about a Palm version.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Would getting the guide itself on the Kindle help you? The guide is essentially a collection of links to mobi files, so when you click on them, it would have to hand off to Safari, which would then need to know how to start the download.
You would need to email the mobi books themselves to your Amazon account, which could then push directly to the Kindle app. Feedbooks could easily add the ability email from their mobile site, once they verified that emailed attachments do get pushed to the iPhone Kindle.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Y’know, there’s probably no reason to force a workaround. There are Feedbooks applications for the iPhone. I might give one of those a shot.
link
March 4th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I know people who have used Stanza on the iPhone, and think it’s good, but I just don’t think that the book-reading experience on the iPhone is all that great. It’s just too small a screen to be comfortable for reading for any length of time.
That said, I do have the complete works of Shakespeare on my iPhone, and I was reading Henry IV Part I, and it was OK reading (I can’t say I’ve read much Shakespeare since college, so that added to the rough experience). I also have the new Papers app, which puts my journal article PDFs on my iPhone — it’s great for referring to papers, but not all that great for reading something for the first time.
Bottom line — the Kindle app didn’t seem to make the iPhone into a Kindle. It just gives you another way to send money to Amazon. I agree that Amazon ought to bundle Kindle versions with all “dead tree” books, and should also let you retroactively download Kindle versions of every book you’ve ever bought from Amazon — or sell them for $1 or something.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:30 am
So the Kindle III, aka Kindle DX, has been announced. Available for pre-order today, the DX costs a midge under $500, and there will be a subsidization program available via NY Times, Washington Post and possibly some universities.
So is bigger better? The Kindle II is svelte enough to stick in a small bag, the DX looks more laptop-sized. What do the Kindle users among us think?
May 7th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Whose opinion are you asking for, Serena’s? Isn’t she the only Kindle user among us?
In any case, if you were wondering what I thought, I think it’s way to big and ugly looking. The Kindle (II) is a nice compromise between portable and readable. Not great for newspapers, but good enough for books.
The other problem is the pitch to the university crowd. If all you do is read something, the Kindle is great. If you mark up the text, write in the margins, or fold down pages, the Kindle isn’t going to give you the same abilities, even if they have things like bookmarking and note taking implemented. It’s just not the same. In other words, the Kindle model (if not the hardware) is optimal for buying novels and maybe newspapers, but probably not textbooks.
I’m sure you all saw the engadget editors’ editorial about the new Kindle yesterday — if not, it’s here.
Finally, Jake, what’s up with that link to Amazon in the comment above?
May 7th, 2009 at 11:13 am
You can put anything you want as the text in the URL. Only the B00 number is used to actually ind the page.
I think the textbook appeal is more for dealing w/ updates, and it always made more sense to me for elementary & high schools more so than college. If the school can buy one Kindle instead of 10 textbooks, it makes economic sense if the price model is right… and the kids don’t break it.
For college texts, the point is really missed– books aren’t $100 because of printing costs, they are $100 because of the monopoly that is implicit for each class. Kindle books will still be stupid expensive with $0 resale value. I don’t see the appeal from an economic point of view.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
There’s certainly appeal in consolidating all your textbooks in a single slim E-reader, but in this case, there are so many compromises on the studying experience, it’s probably DOA. Especially with engineering texts, where you often have to flip to a table of equations or reference other books, it simply wouldn’t work. The Kindle sucks when you want to jump to different locations. Way too slow. Do any of you guys read papers from the PDFs on screen? I still print them out.
I don’t think we have any regrets. Kindle DX just isn’t as attractive, for a lot of reasons (too big for no real benefit for reading books). Also it really needs color for text books.