Next page buttons now click inward rather than toward the outside edge, which solves the accidental paging problem that plagued the old Kindle
Inspired by the iPod
Spring-loaded on/off button makes way more sense
New 5-way button beats the hell out of the old vertical scroller
Text-to-Speech, by far the most significant feature addition of the Kindle2*
* A note about Text-to-Speech: This is pretty amazing. I hadn’t thought much about this feature, other than the fact that it was pissing off the Author’s Guild but I just turned it on and let it run. The pages automatically turn to follow the read text. The voice is pretty natural. If it had been crappy, I doubt the Author’s Guild would be crying foul over lost royalties for audiobooks.
General impressions about the machine itself
It reminds me of a big, thin iPod.
The inward-facing buttons kind of make sense, but I don’t know why they feel weird. Maybe I’ll get used to it, just like I got used to being careful about holding it there because of the accidental page turn design of the previous buttons.
Keyboard is way small. Actually, the buttons are actually bigger than the keyboard on a Treo or a Blackberry, but because they’re spaced out, and because of the width of the thing, you can’t type as fast with two thumbs. Maybe I’ll learn to do it faster over time, like I did with my iPhone keyboard.
I’ll be posting more thoughts on the actual reading experience later, once I actually get around to reading something on it.
Well, after a flurry of slapdash HTML/CSSery done while watching the Oscars, I’ve put up the new public site for the Redub Reader. It’s at http://reader.redub.org. Totally coded by hand, though I’m sure I’ll port it over to WordPress at some point, but sometimes it’s just easier to maintain good ol’ fashioned HTML pages with TextMate.
Aya and I were watching the trailer for We Live in Public on Sunday and there was a line that said something to the effect of “blah blah mumble being online all the time mumble mumble like an addiction, it’s like Attention Deficit Disorder blah blah” at which point Aya shot me an accusing glance, in a kind of non-verbal intervention.
Okay, I admit it (that’s the first step towards recovery, right?). I have a problem. I am online most of my waking hours (see my self-analysis). Rarely do my computers ever get switched off (I just sleep them). I can argue that it’s my livelihood. I can say I’m trying to be one of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and that I have to amass 10,000 hours of, um, practice so I can be an “expert” on teh internets.
But the truth is, I like the feeling of knowing what’s up with my network, and the rest of the world. I am more aware than I used to be. I care about politics because I am more engaged. I can blame part of it on genetics. Growing up, my brother and I would rarely be without a book. I used to carry a huge backpack filled with books wherever I went — in fact, I would feel naked without the weight around my shoulders. My brother ate sci-fi pulp novels for breakfast. (He is actually a freakishly speedy reader, eating entire pages in a glance.) My dad would spend hours sitting on the toilet reading scientific journals (xeroxed from the library).
The point I tried to make is that the only thing that’s changed is that we’ve shifted the same activity from “atoms to bits” (as Nicholas Negroponte likes to put it). No more 50lb backpacks; just a 4lb laptop. Instead of reams of paper, which are now gathering dust in a box taking up space in the basement, I now have Evernote, del.icio.us, and Google Reader that live in the airy Cloud.
The thing we can’t seem to get over is this: when it’s on paper, it’s okay. But when it hits the screen, somehow it becomes problematic, stigmatized, it’s an “addiction.”
One way of looking at it is that we have gotten lulled into the idea that if something made it into print, it had to be knowledge. But we now know this is not the case. We’re all in a jumble right now. The computer is the locus of too many activities: work, play, banking, browsing, rubber-necking at the train-wreck of humanity, study, creativity, etc. They are all crammed together and flattened out such that the bad taints the good (never the opposite).
Two designers in London have printed Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008, which is a publication of “stuff from the internet…printed in a newspaper format”
Another way of seeing it is from a very physical reality. For all its atomic encumbrances, the book is portable, and computers, surprisingly less so, though that all is changing. I am seeing more ordinary people whip open their laptops on the subway, more people reading on their phones, and a new wave of netbooks is hitting the streets. The screen forces us to come to it. It emanates information, and it is information of an altogether new and different quality because it is born on a screen and is meant to live on a screen, never to be frozen in print, and we are entranced by its flickering aura.
Nothing excites me more than getting my paws on something I really really want to read — a new graphic novel, the latest New York Times Magazine, or perhaps the book I’m currently working on (reading, that is). Maybe it’s the english major in me. I am one of those people who finds it hard just to sit down and eat breakfast without reading something, even the side of a cereal box if there’s nothing else.
Also my destination affects this state of excitement considerably. Perhaps it’s this sense of readerly anticipation that makes me look forward to train rides so much (long plane rides less so). Locked in a train car, I know I will be a willing captive to my reading material, like Ulysses roping himself to the mast so he can hear the aching beauty of the sirens without going mad and throwing himself overboard.
My sirens are the multitude of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, every item an irresistible maiden of interestingness. I am a creature of distraction. (And I know I’m not alone.)
The age we’re in right now isn’t helping much. I check my precious feeds on my iPhone if I’m not on my laptop or sitting in front of my computer at work. My Google Reader Trends are damning:
Trends from my Google Reader for 8 Dec, 2008 - 6 Jan, 2009
I redrew the graph to highlight a couple of things:
My Google Reader habit throughout the day
I threw a gradient in the background to show approximate daylight versus items coming into my RSS feeds.
Josh (i2pi) happened to be in the office and remarked that he hates seeing the (1000+) indicator in his Google Reader (ie, that a feed group has more than 1000 unread items) because he enjoys the sense of accomplishment of processing through a whole “stack” of items, to see it reduce from 1000 down to zero, what I realized later is called “inbox zero” (from Merlin Mann’s really interesting talk originally about managing email clutter).
What I got from this little bit of self-reflection is:
1. I cast a pretty wide net.
I am subscribed to something like 47 RSS feeds, many of which each yield thousands of posts a day (Digg, reddit). If you’re curious, here’s the public page of my “blogosphere” RSS feed. I occassionally will unsubscribe to ones when they begin to feel spammy, but in general, I like to fly at 20,000 feet, scan the headlines, then zoom down when I see something that catches my eye. Or to quote Clay Shirky once again: “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” That said, my filter could probably use some tweaking.
2. I check my feeds. A lot. Maybe too much.
Just to satisfy my curiosity, I took the “Items Read” from my Google Trends graph and amplified the range to get a better view:
Actual items read
This represents the actual volume of items I bothered to click on and read through. In online advertising-speak, my clickthrough rate on my blogosphere RSS feed is around 10-12%.
If you suppose that, on average, a blog post is around 500 words, and I read 839 items in the past 30 days, that means I’ve read around 419,500 words in a month. If you then suppose that, on average, a novel is around 50,000 words, then I’ve read the equivalent of 8.4 novels this month!
Who says people don’t read anymore? (We just aren’t necessarily reading books all the time…)
Is this healthy?
Gotta run. The Reader calls, but out of curiosity, how do you read?
I bought the Amazon Kindle right when it came out in late 2007. It’s gotten an increasing amount of press since then, culminating in Oprah’s gushing endorsement of it on October 24, 2008. (The NYTimes recently wrote a piece about e-books which attributed their rise in interest, in part, to the sales of the Kindle.) Since Amazon does not release sales numbers for whatever reason (perhaps because they are such a miniscule part of their business) analysts are estimating that there are somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 in circulation at the end of 2008. Anecdotally, I’ve been noticing it more and more in airplanes and airports, and I’ve been hearing reports from random friends that their parents swear by them now.
To be honest, I marveled at the thing when I first got it, mostly because of the Whispernet feature which allows you to download a book on the fly, say, on your way to the subway, rather than stopping by a bookstore or library, (just what I need — more encouragement not to engage in planning ahead) but the visual design of the thing was wholly disappointing, and thus, it began to grow dust, languishing unused next to my bedside reading table. The Kindle had somehow failed to capture the simple aesthetic pleasure of reading.
“Flow State”
Jeff Bezos, in his interview with Charlie Rose about the Kindle, remarked that his team’s number one design objective in the Kindle was to achieve the “flow state” of reading — that is, the ability of the physical object of the book, the paper, the ink, the binding, to disappear when the reader enters the world created by the author’s words.
I am certain it’s easier to get into this “flow state” when you’ve got something in front of you that you really, truly want to read. And on this score, Kindle (and Amazon) should have things pretty much locked up (literally) in their almost infinite catalog of selections from the major publishers. Granted, this probably took a ton of negotiating on the part of Amazon with all of the major publishers for distribution rights, but when you’re Amazon, I’m sure you can pretty much walk into the room with a baseball bat and say, “We’re doing this. You all on board? Great. Sign here.”
Note: There are some technical limitations that are endemic to all ebook readers that use E Ink technology (or at least that I am attributing to limitations in E Ink) that I won’t discuss here, like the supremely annoying black screen when you change pages and the menu and windowing UI (though the new the new Sony PRS-700 has a touch screen interface which is much more elegant).
First, the good parts
Over the holidays, I was in the Charlotte airport, staring down an hour delay in my flight, and I walked by a bookseller where I noticed Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Ascent of Money, which I had forgotten was at the top of my list of books to read over the holidays. I opened the cover and balked when I saw that it was selling for $29.95. Somewhat in price shock, I marched back to my luggage, took out my Kindle, and I downloaded a sample chapter. After reading a few clicks, I was hooked and determined to have it, especially after seeing the Kindle price: $9.99.
Note the price differential (list price of $29.95 and Kindle price of $9.99)
$29.95 – $9.99 = $19.96.
Which begs the question: What’s that extra $19.96 paying for? In addition to the paper, the ink and printing, the cover material, the binding, and bailing out a floundering publishing industry, I realized that much of it goes into something that may or may not break your flow state: good typography.
Whither Good Typography?
If the web is 95% typography, then e-books are somewhere in the range of 98%. And in my wide and varied research, I think I can safely say that the reason reading long texts on screens hurts so much is that there are very few people who can set type properly anymore (that, and annoying banner ads and vertical scrolling, but we will address these problems in another post). Unfortunately, this is the case with the Kindle as well. The font they’ve chosen for all body text is Caecelia, drawn by Peter Matthias Noordzij. It’s a smart choice, since it’s an Egyptian (slab serif), so you get the advantage of serifs without having to worry about the slope of the foot getting killed at smaller sizes, but the way it’s treated in the Kindle is, well, unfortunate.
Lists
Basic component of HTML rendered rather thoughtlessly by the Kindle:
Kindle tripping over an ordered list
Images
The resolution of E Ink technology is purportedly around 300 dpi. In practice, or at least the way the Kindle renders images, it reminds one of the early days of the Palm, or of mezzotint. For instance, this graph below probably has some important labels, but no matter how hard I squint I can’t make out the text. I wonder if this were printed at 300 dpi on a laserprinter if it would be legible. I am sure the crappiness of the image quality is due to the fact that with E Ink you have only black or white “pixel” molecules with which to render text or image, and so it doesn’t matter if you have 300 dpi, you still need some levels of grey in order to do proper anti-aliasing and image reproduction. (I bet the image format on the Kindle is BMP.)
Not just a crappy photo; the type is illegible in real life.
Captions
You would think someone on the Kindle team would have been able to spend a little time to create a style for caption text to differentiate them from the body copy. (The same is true of block quotes — no differentiating style.) I don’t know if this particular book was rushed through without any styling or what, but in the immortal words of Duke Leto (in the David Lynch version of Dune), “Really damn sloppy!”
Awkward line breaking on centered captions
Rivers
It looks like by default, the Kindle likes to justify its pages of text. This gives you an even rag on the right side instead of a ragged, irregular one. The pros and cons of this can be debated. There are two variables that need to be adjusted for justifying wholesale large swaths of text:
Font size
Hyphenation
Without control of these two factors you will certainly have rivers, ie, channels of whitespace running down the paragraphs since whitespace, or more accurately, word spacing, is what is used to justify the lines. Unfortunately, font size can be controlled by the user on the Kindle, so whenever you decide to change the font size, the word spacing changes, and if you don’t have a hyphenation library (which it appears Kindle doesn’t have on board yet) and you get a diluvian horrorshow:
Justification without hyphenation
So, what happened to the text on the way to the Kindle?
One way to look at these typographic failures is to see them as byproducts of digitization, or to use my favorite analogy, this is what happens when you force atoms into the digital blender. Unfortunately, this is fraught with messiness (as clearly evidenced above) and it’s not clear who is responsible for the cleaning up of the digitizing mess. According to the Newsweek article:
Though Bezos won’t get terribly specific, Amazon itself is also involved in scanning books, many of which it captured as part of its groundbreaking Search Inside the Book program. But most are done by the publishers themselves, at a cost of about $200 for each book converted to digital.
Really? I highly doubt that scanning is part of the process of getting a book on the Kindle. I am pretty sure that most books nowadays begin on the computer (typed by the author on a word processor), then they are laid out by a designer on a computer, so that there is no need for them to make the round trip to print and then back again through a scanner.
Here’s what I think happens: they take the InDesign (or Quark ) file used for the book, export it as XML, and add Kindle-specific markup (this is an image, this is a caption, this is a list, and so on) to turn it into the proprietary AZW format. The semantic structure of books isn’t that complicated. It’s getting them to render nicely at all page-widths, font-sizes, etc. that’s hard.
Final Grade
From a purely visual, typography standpoint, I’d give the Kindle a C+. Good effort, but poor attention to detail. Fortunately many of these details just need some care and adjustment and are not necessarily the result of technical failures, just laziness and poor design judgement.
Next, I’m going to check out the new Sony PRS-700, which has a touch screen and highlighting ability. Stay tuned!
