This morning I got to read the New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker which tears the Kindle to pieces. It didn’t seem all that devastating until I got to the end:
[I]f you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to wake up the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear….
Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything. It’s not trying to be ink on paper.
My wife has an iPod Touch, so we did precisely this. [It turns out the application is actually called “Kindle for iPhone.” It works the same on both devices.] Then we downloaded a free sample chapter of a bestseller I might actually want to read some day. And guess what? It worked exactly the way Baker described. You can even change the print size like on an Kindle and it looked perfectly fine to me.
The root of Amazon’s problem is then not necessarily that the Kindle works badly. I’ve played around with other people’s to have previously coveted one. The problem is why should anyone go out and buy a Kindle when there are other devices out there that work just as well AND do other things besides display books? The only way I can see around this is to come out with a Kindle phone, but people will look pretty stupid hold a page-shaped device up to the ears.
PS: I hate to sound materialistic, but it’s more for my wife’s sake (since she has trouble buying anything for me): If I’m not getting a Kindle, what interesting new-fangled electronic gizmo should I put at the top of my Christmas list? And don’t be shy about making suggestions in the comments as she doesn’t read the blog.
More or Less Bunk 
A few things about a kindle vs. an ipod touch, I have both, are that the kindle has a much larger screen (less page turning), the digital ink allows for longer term comfortable reading even in direct sunlight and my son doesn’t beg to have it to watch a video or play a game on it. It’s all mine! Additionally, no calendar appointments or other notifications pop up on it and I can look up a word by selecting it (if the ipod has that feature I don’t know how to do it).
That article from the New Yorker annoys me.
I think people forget that the Kindle is intended to be a reader and nothing else. Sure you can read Kindle books on a iPod Touch, but not as easily. The fact is the moment you begin to design a device that does many things, it’s not going to do any one particular thing really well.
[…] over the part of the Nicholson Baker article that Stan Katz is referring to here: He [meaning Baker in the New Yorker] also reports that Amazon has struck a deal with several universities, Princeton among them, to […]
Did you ever end up getting a Kindle or any other kind of eReader? Since this post was published, lots of different eReaders have either been released or announced. So many that I finally moved my site to a new domain (www.eReaderChat.com).
So, what’s the verdict? Does the iPad sound more suitable to you?
Still haven’t bought an eReader. My wife wants an iPad (which we might share), but there’s no way I’m jumping in that pond until they get the bugs worked out.
[…] are for suckers,” “Kindles are still for suckers,” and much more along these lines. To summarize, I went from wanting a Kindle desperately, to hating them horribly, to buying […]