I kept meaning to predict that Wall Street Journal gadget reviewer Walt Mossberg was going to pan the Amazon Kindle e-book reader because he’s hyper-sensitive to minor flaws. But life intervened and I didn’t get the chance. And, of course, now he has. Sometimes Mossberg is right on, but unfortunately with the Kindle, he’s far off-base.
Take for example, his complaint — and it’s a common one — that the buttons on the Kindle are confusing, illogical or too easy to press. He’s like a guy who gets into a new car for the first time and complains that the parking break isn’t where he expected it would be. Sure — a button may not be where you expected it before you had a Kindle. But use the Kindle for an hour or two and it becomes second nature. The big, easy to push buttons are a benefit, too. You don’t have to draw your eyes or your thoughts away from the text to turn the page JUST LIKE A BOOK.
Mossberg and other button whiners want the Kindle redesigned to work better for the first hour and much, much worse for the next two years. I’ve quickly internalized how to pick up and hold the Kindle without any inadvertent button pushes and so will you. His complaints about the leather cover and the on-off switch are similar. The power button is “hidden on the back.” Right – it’s hidden there until the first time you see it and then it’s not hidden ever again.
Mossberg also makes the common factual mistake of claiming that to put your own files on the Kindle “you have to email them to Amazon for conversion to a proprietary Kindle format.” Kindle handles text files with no conversion and other files can be converted on your own PC with the free Mobipocket Creator software, which handles Word, PDF and HTML formats. It’s less burdensome than burning songs off a CD into MP3 format.
There’s also no mention in his review of many of the Kindle’s best features for avid readers. As I noted the other day, the Kindle offers a reading experience for lengthy hardcovers that is in many ways better than reading a lengthy hardcover. It’s more comfortable to hold in a variety of positions, it weighs less, it fits more easily in your briefcase, it costs less (a lot less!) and you don’t even have to go to the book store to get your book. You can change the size of the typeface, smaller for high-speed reading and bigger when you get a little drowsy before bed. You can easily follow up references over the Internet without putting your Kindle down. You can do full word searches beyond what any printed index can do and you can look up any word in Kindle’s dictionary lickety-split.
Kindle surely isn’t perfect. Book listings should offer more organization options and there ought to be a way to gift a Kindle title to a friend, as Mossberg requests. But these are very minor nits and ones that Amazon can easily fix with a software upgrade. And why no mention of the fact that unlike the first generation ipod, which only worked on Macs, or the current Zune, which only works on Windows, the Kindle’s self-contained book store model works with Mac, Windows, Linux or any other operating system. Imperfect it may be, but Kindle is ready for prime time.
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