reading e-books, jan 10

Just read a book on a Kindle (Hunger Games, Collins.  Read it).  Reading about Ben Franklin on it now, and have downloaded a few other things (L. Frank Baum, a Jules Verne I had never heard of).  You can find lots for free, or for $0.99 or for two or three or four bucks.  Then most all else is $9 or $9.99.  But you’ll find some thirteen and fourteen and even twenty-six dollar kindle items, too.

Reading it is pleasant.  The design is imperfect (for me), but the nature of industrial design is to hit the most best applicability and appreciation in the sorta average most number of folks, so I can’t fault them on not knowing my thumb’s muscle memory or my preference for ovular rather than squarish.  Etc.  I can’t fault them for being right-handed-centric (what the hell, be right-handed-centric, since most of us are right-handed.  I don’t give a damn abt that so much).  Amazon hasn’t accumulated enough data on us as individuals, hasn’t yet mapped out our personomies to such a degree that they can offer really personal devices.

But I can fault them for putting the heat vents on the bottom back of the thing rather than on the top back of the thing (yr hands want to be near the bottom and so block the vents).  I can fault them for circle letter buttons spaced just a little too-far apart.  I can fault them for not letting the ‘five directional button’ not let a man scroll to the bottom of the screen if he presses ‘up’ once he’s at the top of it.  And I can fault, as that poor old cur N. Baker has it, not making the letters spill out like black lacquered chopsticks on a white tablecloth (it is, and I tried to forgive it but it IS, a dingy screen with low-contrast).  And I can get into all the DRM stuff, all the Cory Doctorow rants, all the ‘hey you! let me read MY way!’ stuff, but I won’t (though it is a serious fault).  And how about fonts?  Why not let readers choose font styles?

So I repeat: it’s pleasant to read.

Pages flip by easily.  Your fingers flip with a click and your through a chapter in a few minutes and it remembers where you stopped and you can save notes or define words or highlight phrases for later pondering.  The white and the gray make the machine recede and the words (even if low contrast) pop forward.  Maybe the low contrast makes you have to sink in with your eye-nerve meat, deeper into the text like.  And that gets you submerged more, somehow.  But it is more of a submersive and immersive reading experience than paper — that’s, for me, a fact.  I have to think less about the medium, and so the world of the words, the content, the Gaiman-ish capital-s Story, or whatever, pulls you in deeper.  It’s true.  For me.  And that’s also why I can’t get why folks would fancy-up and laser-etch their cases (see pic below).  As is, the machine’s pretty good at doing what it ought to — disappearing.  Doctored and pinked and Von Dutched, it can’t disappear as well as it might.

That’s the early report.  There’ll probably be more on this later.

And I’ve never yet laid a finger on the Sony Thing or the Nook (B&N’s device), but I’d like to check them out and compare.  I reckon one day multiple e-book devices will be as commonly-considered-essential as multiple Web browsers are now (Firefox for this plug-in, Chrome for that).  And I reckon the only e-book format that should become standard is a free and open one (some DRM-free text, please)… and Kindle ain’t got that yet.

(The Kindle machine was a gift from my dear Paw-in-Law.  Thankee sai).

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UPDATE: They ain’t no ‘heat vents’, they’s the speakers!  And the screen-re-orientation feature is very handy.