Omigoodness. I managed to get my hands on a Kindle 2 this past weekend and aside from the fact that the Whispernet (Amazon’s renaming of Sprint’s EVDO Internet service) is totally inaccessible for me, and it would be an absolute pain for me to actually put any books on the device, I really really really want the new Kindle. 
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| Kindle 2 ($360) | Kindle (discont’d) | Sony Reader PRS-505 ($299) |
My major complaints about the original Kindle were that it was flimsy, thick, clunky, and the buttons were not well designed. The plastic it was designed from made its weight distribution funny – so it actually even aggravated my tendonitis. I liked the WhisperNet feature, and the keyboard – but the slowness of the screen made annotating books a pain at best, and referencing the annotations wasn’t really useful enough to merit the design flaws. Amazon’s closed ebook format isn’t great either – most of stuff I want to read just happens not to be available in Kindle format (i.e. academic papers, textbooks, papers that I’m reviewing/editing), so I ended up with the Sony Reader which supports viewing of native PDFs as images, with additional support for portrait or landscape viewing (I wish there was a button), and a zoom button for magnifying the text if you have OCR’d text accompanying the image. Since I didn’t want to take a suitcase full of books with me to Uganda, I sliced the bindings off of them, scanned them to pdf and OCR’d them, and I’m reading them on my reader instead. Much better carrying a slim e-book reader on the plane than the 2-inch thick copy of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
The Kindle 2 is even slimmer than the Sony Reader, also comes with a leather case, and has the advantage of incorporating wireless and a keyboards for just $60 more. Kindle has access to a larger selection of copyrighted e-books, “Kindle Editions” at much better prices, with a much cleaner interface. Sony’s software, frankly, is flaky, slow, and crashes a lot. But at least I can put my PDFs on it directly. I think for the Kindle I still would have to email my PDFs to amazon and pay them 10-15 cents to upload them to the Kindle in some weird, potentially mangled, format. I might be able to put up with that from Berkeley, but depending on email access for giant PDFs out here is totally impossible. And I like my WYSIWYG PDFs. In that sort of vein – Sony’s ebook philosophies are actually more “free thinking” than Amazon’s (for all those copyleft people out there) and the Sony Reader supports the open eBook format (ePub), and as Wired notes, actually provides access to more public domain books than Amazon offers on the Kindle through a recent deal with Google Books.
What I really want is for Amazon to build a Kindle that supports GSM, so I can stick a Ugandan SIM card in it and download Kindle books over the local network? Please? Or I guess I can wait until i get back next year…
I have this vague theory that the Kindle devices might make decent computing platforms for rural areas. Imagine – data connectivity, low-powered devices that don’t need to be charged more than once every two weeks or so, built-in keyboards, screens that are visible in sunlight, a large screen, and a price point comparable to smartphones, or less? What the heck am I doing working with smartphones with tiny screens, batteries that die in a day, and keyboards that are too small for healthworkers to read? Oh yeah… waiting for the ebooks to take off, the platform to stabilize and open up, and um.. trying to finish up my dissertation before starting another project. But if amazon is willing to throw some summer interns at me this year, and a few Kindles, I think I could manage to host them here in Uganda. Umm. We just need to find an EVDO network or get Sprint to subsidize the roaming charges? =) Anyone know someone at Amazon?
There’s also a Sony Reader PRS-700, which I haven’t seen, retailing for $399. It includes an LED light (which I think is great, since I can’t get my booklights to attach, and I think it is lame to have to wear my headlamp to bed, or to have to lift the mosquito net to turn off the lamp on my nightstand), and a touchscreen. I can’t imagine how the touchscreen actually works – I think it’s something I’ll have to see to really understand/evaluate. But ultimately I think Sony will have to move towards integrating wireless into their readers…
were do i get my kindle fixed?
Im In Uganda, Just Ppurchased the Kindle 2 but im not getting any network. Come-on amazone wats up