Still loving the Kindle.
Still tacking “… but …” lines to that love.
For a convenient, powerful, thrifty, long-battery-lived, easy way to carry a butt-load of books around, the Kindle makes all sorts of awesome sense.
But …
- I miss book covers. I miss the personality about a book that the book cover provides (for better or worse). I miss the book cover differentiating one book from another, something that is still a bit fuzzy in the Kindle experience.
- I don’t miss walking around with a particularly grotesque or nerdly book cover on the book I’m reading.
- The ability to read on the screen in full daylight is remarkable. More than remarkable. Stunning. Still … I could wish for a truer white background. Sometimes the contrast is still not what I’d like.
- The biggest weakness of the Kindle is categorizing and grouping books. To call the process time-consuming and clunky, and the presentation of your library awkward and not terribly helpful, would be to speak kindly. In theory, this would be a great thing to use the Kindle for Windows app — but it’s even more brain-dead than the Kindle itself. As it stands, it strikes me as far too easy to “misplace” books. (Plus … dudes, covers.)
- The original Kindle allowed you to add images to the screen saver (the “sleep” image that automatically comes up). That got taken away, but there’s a robust ecosystem of advice on how to hack the Kindle to let you add such additional files. Has anyone actually done it and not had their Kindle burst into flames? (And, while on this theme — hey, Amazon, why not download an image of the current book you’re reading as a screen saver? It’s a no-brainer!)
Still, love my Kindle. The above are more like nits to pick about a spouse who squeezes from the middle of the tube or puts the toilet paper on the roll upside down … irritating, but not deal-breaking.
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1. How do you feel about changes to book covers in subsequent printings? For many years I had a first edition paperback copy of Stephen E. Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek. I reread it so many times I had to buy a new copy, and the white cover had been replaced by a silver one that screamed “not a first printing” to everybody (well, to me, anyway).
2. So buy the hardcover edition and remove the dust jacket. 😉
3. Would you like whiter pages in books? It worked for comics, which went from that beige sort of paper to true white. I think I only see that in slick coffee-table books.
Does the Kindle have no way to change the settings for contrast and brightness? That seems like a serious oversight.
4. I’m very fussy about how books are grouped on my shelves. That is, I was when my shelves had room for all my books. The last hundred or so are sort of stacked sideways in front of the properly-shelved ones. 🙁
I would expect an interface that would let me sort according to title, author, date, genre, and keyword. The Kindle doesn’t let you do that???
5. I would rather not hack my mobile devices for fear of bricking them. Of course the screensaver should be the cover of the book, and ideally should rotate through all current and past covers of the book (domestic, at least).
@Avo:
1. It depends. Some first edition covers aren’t as good as some subsequent editions (esp. when you get into the paperback market).
2. Usually I just hold my bookmark across the offending picture. 🙂
3. The contrast is fine. It’s an intrinsic grayness of the device (probably because it’s not backlit).
4. On my Real Bookshelves, we have things sorted by genre (SF&F, Mystery, Other), then by author. Things end up sideways on the shelves if (a) the author rows don’t allow easy expansion (i.e., we really need to get rid of some books), or (b) its one of those wretched over-tall paperbacks (since our paperback shelves are built to standard p/b size).
I am able to cluster books on the Kindle into categories (though it appears to be one category per book). But I have to do it from within the category, not by the book. And it’s difficult to tell which books haven’t already been picked for a category. It’s just … clumsy.
The Kindle allows me to sort books by category (“Collection”), Most Recent*, Title, or Author. Within collections, you can sort by Most Recent*, Title, or Author.
*Most Recent = most recently touched. So most recently opened for reading, or most recently bought or loaded to the Kindle. Which easily makes things annoying.
I’d love to sort by read/unread, for example.
5. I am apprehensive about the hack for alternate screen savers, but it seems like a lot of people have done it without too much difficulty.
I hadn’t thought about alternate covers. I don’t think I’d go for that option. I want “a” cover for the book, whatever it is.