{"id":903,"date":"2010-08-01T18:22:31","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T23:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=903"},"modified":"2010-08-01T18:43:31","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T23:43:31","slug":"my-kindle-week-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=903","title":{"rendered":"My Kindle — Week Two"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So after endless discussion and debate \u2014 internal and external, I finally bought a Kindle DX.\u00a0 As my regular readers (I\u2019m talking to you Kirkland and Walsall) know, I love books <\/a>\u2013 the look and feel of them, the way they turn to dust and crumble in your hand. I love used books that have yellowing paper that breaks off if you try to fold a corner to save a place. But there\u2019s only so much room in my apartment.<\/p>\n

Why a Kindle? Why not a Nook, or Sony E-Reader, or Brand X, or I-PAD?<\/strong><\/p>\n

After reading the recent New Yorker<\/a> <\/em>article on Bezos v. Jobs and Big Publishing, I decided maybe it was worth supporting Amazon. If we\u2019re all going to be reading e-books in the future, it would be nice to be reading them cheap, and Bezos at least acknowledges that it costs much less to produce an e-book than a print book and some of those savings should be passed on to consumers.\u00a0 As a print consumer, most of the books I buy are discounted or more likely used. I like the idea of more cheap content, and Amazon offers droves of it. As a writer, I love that Kindle offers easy access to self-publishing with 70% royalty, which also deserves supporting.<\/p>\n

I get the utility of the I-PAD as an easy display to show off your photos, watch movies, surf the web, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s great for reading art books, graphic novels and those \u201cbooks of the future<\/a>\u201d with lots of live links including to video clips, photos, etc. However, for reading words on a page<\/em>,\u00a0 the Kindle is far superior. No backlight, good contrast, and lightweight. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t give me a screen headache.\u00a0 Call me a relic, but I\u2019m fine surfing the web on my computer, and if I had unlimited income I\u2019d buy an I-PAD as well, but for reading books and other texts, this works best.<\/p>\n

I chose the DX, a big price jump from the regular Kindles, because I wanted the screen size. The Nook, by the way, doesn\u2019t come big.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always been farsighted and since passing into my decrepitude, small print has been a lot of work. The DX allows me a full screen of text displayed in a reasonably large font.\u00a0 It\u2019s a nice size for reading and storing work-related PDFs and an alternative to printing them out.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve Learned So Far:
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Proofreading. Who knew?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

One thing I didn\u2019t even think would be useful is the \u201ctext to voice\u201d feature. Just as an experiment, I turned it on to listen to my \u00a0novel, Loisaida<\/em><\/a>. Despite having proofread several times the old-fashioned way and with friends as readers, I was suddenly \u201cseeing\u201d a ton of errors and formatting inconsistencies I hadn\u2019t caught before. I was able to note them using the mark-up feature. It\u2019s awkward for editing as you can\u2019t directly change the text, and the keyboard isn\u2019t great. But the combination of being able to read something that looks like print and hear the words clearly (albeit mechanically) is a terrific proofreading tool.<\/p>\n

Sharing, not encouraged.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m enjoying my two-week free trial subscription to The New York Times<\/em> on Kindle.\u00a0 It\u2019s great to browse through the articles one at a time and not have to move from page 1 to page 13 to finish reading something. I thought I\u2019d be able to save some trees and chuck my home delivery subscription, however, here we run into a problem. I am pair-bonded.\u00a0 Even if my better-half had his own Kindle, he\u2019d need his own subscription to read The Times<\/em> on it.\u00a0 I suppose the idea would be for him to get his own Kindle and we could each trade off with different subscriptions, but this is not happening anytime soon, Mr. Bezos. While my husband says he\u2019s fine reading the paper on the computer screen, he says it in an \u201cI\u2019ll just read in the dark\u201d tone, so for now at least we\u2019ll stick to the paper version of the paper.<\/p>\n

(Of course, I\u2019m hardly the first to notice the sharing issue\u00a0 and there is a less than perfect fix. Apparently, if we bought another <\/em> Kindle and <\/em>kept my name on the account for both devices, The Times<\/em> could go to both. But that would destroy our sense of individuality and hence the marriage itself, leading to a court fights over custody of the content when we divorce.)<\/p>\n

Thumb fatigue and the Plight of the Left-Handed<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I wish there were a better way to turn the page. The button that needs to be pushed, feels counter-intuitive. Why not a touchscreen (like I-PAD) for this one feature?\u00a0 I noticed also when I was reading intensely (my proofreading binge), my right arm from thumb to elbow started to ache.\u00a0 I\u2019m a righty, but would have liked to switch hands. The only way to do that is to turn the image upside down and then turn the Kindle itself upside down. This means, however, that the page turning arrows will be pointing in the wrong direction and the keyboard \u2014 in case you want to make notes, adjust the font, etc., \u2014 will also be upside down. I don\u2019t know whether or not the other devices are more \u201cleft-hand friendly,\u201d but I wouldn\u2019t recommend this one to a lefty.<\/p>\n

One Click Buying Adds Up<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m no expert on the\u00a0 economics of the Kindle, but I imagine the main money is not in the sales of the apparatus itself, but in all the Amazon products bought once you own one. While the Kindle doesn\u2019t surf the web, it does surf the Amazon store quite easily and allows you to purchase anything you want with just one-click. Impulse buying is encouraged and just about every periodical and blog comes with a free two-week trial, which you have to remember to cancel before they start charging you.<\/p>\n

And Finally: The Kindle Community \u2014 Are we just talking to ourselves?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Another glitch, probably worthy of it\u2019s own dissertation or at least a post \u2014 the Kindle of course comes with its own \u201cKindle Community\u201d of forums because\u00a0 couldn\u2019t we all use more social networking?\u00a0 There are tons of threads.\u00a0 Some are about Kindle devices.\u00a0 Many are about content, and most of these\u00a0 seem to be self-published Kindle authors hawking their wares. This leads me suspect that in some ways, the \u201cKindle Community\u201d isn\u2019t very different from the \u201cAuthonomy Community\u201d<\/a> with one exception.\u00a0 Whereas, Harper Collins allows writers to display their work for each other to see and comment on free of charge, Amazon charges for downloading other people\u2019s work, counting these as \u201cbook sales\u201d and gets a 30-65%\u00a0 (depending on price) piece of the action. While there are tens of thousands of self-published books available on Kindle,\u00a0 it\u2019s not at clear who is buying other than other self-published writers.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So after endless discussion and debate \u2014 internal and external, I finally bought a Kindle DX.\u00a0 As my regular readers (I\u2019m talking to you Kirkland and Walsall) know, I love books \u2013 the look and feel of them, the way they turn to dust and crumble in your hand. I love used books that have … Continue reading My Kindle — Week Two<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[29,107,55,71],"tags":[217,215,216,155,218,214],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}