I recently had the opportunity to borrow a Kindle from the EPA library, and it just so happened to fall over the two weeks I took off for Christmas. Sweet, I thought, I’ll have plenty of time to play with this baby in the car on the way to visit family! And so I dutifully charged it and put it in my bag. But I found, as the holiday and car rides wore on, that I didn’t really want to reach for the Kindle. This was quite a surprise to me, as I normally like playing with electronic toys, and I was interested in reading some of the books the library had loaded on the device.
So I thought on this minor conundrum for a while, and finally it hit me. I love the idea of an e-reader. As someone who ran out of bookshelf space several years ago and is currently tucking books into nooks and crannies in my bedroom, the thought of condensing some of those volumes onto one device is appealing. But my reading style doesn’t match the technology – at least, not yet. I read quickly. I also flip back and forth a lot to check things, re-read where I’ve missed a plot point, or deconstruct how the author executed a particular technique. And that’s just fiction- with nonfiction I’m even worse. And let’s not even talk about reference.
Given this, any e-reader with a page turn of more than a half-second or so becomes clunky. The Kindle screen displays less text than a typical paperback, so the slower page turns occur more often than if I were reading an actual book. And if I want to start flipping back and forth, forget it. I’d much rather take the weight of a book and turn back five pages in under a second than the five seconds it would take on the Kindle.
In addition to the page turns, I found navigation in general on the Kindle to be clunky. I spent a few hours reading on the device, and the little five-way button never became familiar. The up/down/side/side movements don’t occur on screen as quickly as I move the button, and I was constantly getting ahead of the screen and then having to correct myself. And pressing that button to select something rarely happened – for some reason I tended to press Home instead, resulting in additional frustration as I tried to get back to where I had been. Because of this, I didn’t even try to take notes on the Kindle. It seemed like a recipe for frustration best left alone.
My last two gripes with the Kindle may well be actual device features, but they certainly didn’t come up when I tried to look for them. Can you zoom in? One of the books I tried to read had small-font captions on images, and they appeared so tiny on the Kindle that they were impossible to read. And I couldn’t find a back light. What’s the point of reading with this thing in the car if you can’t keep going when the sun goes down?
All said, I’m glad I took the opportunity to play with the Kindle, if only to discover that I won’t be shelling out my money for it until it goes through several more generations of development. It needs to be fast enough to withstand my reading pace and flipping habits, easy to take notes on, easy to zoom in on and have a back light so I could read anywhere. Color would also be nice, since some of the images with the captions I couldn’t read would probably have made more sense had they been in color.
If I’m honest, though, as much as I love playing with tech toys, I’m also cheap. If I’m going to buy a gadget whose primary purpose is to read e-books, I want it to do enough other things to make it worth the money. Internet access, so I can look up additional information on items in the text that catch my eye. Basic word processing and copy/paste, so I can take more extensive notes than logically fit in the text. I want something I can bring with me to class and take lecture notes on, while having the textbook available. Some of the dual-screen readers are starting to venture into this territory – the Asus eeeReader looks very promising.
In conclusion, I love the idea of an e-reader. Unfortunately, the Kindle doesn’t match my idea.
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