Kindle Tips

If you are thinking about giving a kindle for Christmas your options are going to be limited.  First, the Kindle Paperwhite (Bookwi.se Review) is backordered and current orders are not expected to ship until Dec 21st.  Cutting it very close for Christmas.  That is the expected shipping date for both the 3G and the wifi only models.

The basic $69 Kindle and the $139 Kindle with Keyboard are currently available and are both very good options.  But when arguably your best kindle is three generations old, the Kindle with Keyboard, it shows how slow the evolution of the Kindle has been.

If you are thinking about the Kindle Tablets things are a bit better.  The basic Kindle Fire ($159) and the Fire HD ($199) are read to ship right now.  Of course both are competing against the Nexus 7 and the iPad Mini.  Amazon wins with content against the Nexus 7 and with price against the iPad Mini.  But it is not a slam dunk decision.

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If you have read many ebooks (no matter the format) you have probably run across a badly formated book, random spacing, blank pages, page number or titles in the middle of a page, missing pages, a footnote or endnote that accidentally is in the middle of a page, illegible images.  And the high rates of misspellings because of bad Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is just unacceptable.

At one point bad formatting might have been excused because it was a new technology.  But ebooks are no longer cutting edge.  Ebooks now sell more copies than hardcovers, not just at Amazon but total.  And not just more copies, but more total revenue as well.

It is time for publishers to make ebook formatting a higher priority.  I have formatted four books for people that I know.  Each case took me about 8 or so hours and I did it for free because I was trying to help someone out.  It is not rocket science, but it does take work.

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Since it has nearly 3 years since I first signed up for Lendle I thought it was time to update my review.  I am leaving the original review at the bottom and only making comments about things that are different or I have noticed since the original review.

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Lendle has continued to grow.  Just over 200,000 books have been loaned and there are also nearly 200,000 books available to lend.  Personally I have loaned almost 450 book.

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The new Amazon Paperwhite Kindle is a very nice ereader.  Arguable, it is the best ereader on the market today.  I have only spend five days with it so far, but I have read portions of five books and completed two before writing this paperwhite review. (Note: I have since purchased my own Paperwhite and updated the review.)

The Light

The biggest new feature of the Paperwhite is its light.  Part of the point of eink ebook readers is that they do not have a backlight (light coming from the back of the screen shining out toward the reader) like LCD screens on a computer or tablet.  The backlight is a major cause of eyestrain. And among a small group of people, it is a major cause of insomnia.

The Paperwhite uses a different technology.  It has a clear strips of fiber optic light that shine down (away from the reader) toward the screen.  This should mean far less eye strain when you read at night with the light on.

The picture on the right is the light turned all the way up, reflecting off my jeans at night.  You can see there is some light that leaks out, but it is pretty minimal.

The light is also very even.  I have used a number of book lights and briefly tried out a Nook Glo. You can see on the picture on the left that the light is very even (again this picture was taken at night with very low light).  It is only the bottom that seems to have any light variation.

This past weekend when I was reading, it was very grey and gloomy.  I kept the light on much of the time, and was continually adjusting it trying to find the right amount of light.  On the whole I found that keeping the light a few notches lower than maximum was the most comfortable lighting for most of the time.  But the light is always just one click away, so it is very easy to change.

Using the light even at very low levels gives the illusion of a much whiter screen and greater contrast.  So the letter look much crisper than previous kindles.  With the light off it is possible to see a small improvement in the screen from previous Kindle models, but it is only a small improvement.

UPDATE: I also have a longer review.

I opened up (my friend’s) new Kindle Paperwhite this morning.

These are my very quick initial impressions. Even though I have seen the statistics about the size and weight, it is smaller than what I thought.  Essentially it is the exact same size as the Kindle 4 (Kindle Basic).

But also as soon as I picked it up I noticed that it feels much more solid.  It is heavier by 2 oz than the Kindle 4 (and one oz less than the Kindle with Keyboard).  The Kindle 4, which is what I primarily use, feels almost hollow when I hold it.  The Paperwhite feels like it is a solid object.  My guess is that much of that is battery.  The Paperwhite battery, with the light on, is supposed to last twice as long as the Kindle 4 with no light.

Visually, the screens do not seem much different. I took a couple of pictures outside in sunlight with the Paperwhite’s light off to show the difference.

Click the picture to get the full size image. The blacks might be a little darker.  The fonts might be a bit clearer.  But there is not a lot of difference.

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For the most part the new kindle announcement is good news.  The new Kindle Paperwhite has a much better screen and continues to focus on reading as its main purpose.

But there are four six areas where I think the new Kindle Paperwhite took a step back.

1) Storage Capacity – The new Paperwhite (the eink Kindle) has half the storage of the Kindle with Keyboard or the Kindle Touch.  I think that 2 GB is enough for storing the current books you are reading, but not for an entire library.  And many people want to store their entire library on a kindle.  Amazon estimates that the new Paperwhites will store 1100 books. I currently have over 3000 books in my kindle library.  On the other hand I try to keep the books on my kindle down to about 40-50.  So it is not a huge deal for me.  Also the kindle software does not like full storage.  So if you kindle is slow, try taking off books that you are not currently reading.

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