Personal Technology » book

Amazon's Kindle 2 Improves the Good, Leaves Out the Bad

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:02:07 +0000

Amazon.com has fixed the worst design flaws in the Kindle, its popular electronic-book reader, while maintaining the excellent book-buying experience that made the first Kindle model tolerable despite those problems.

This week, the company released the Kindle 2, a new version that is much thinner, a tad lighter and a bit taller. It has much more built-in memory, better navigation controls and a slightly improved screen. I’ve been testing the Kindle 2 for a few weeks and consider it a vast improvement over the first Kindle, released in late 2007, which was clumsy and annoying to use. Overall, I found the Kindle 2 to be a well-designed, satisfying piece of hardware.

[ See post to watch video ]

The new model carries the same relatively high $359 price tag as its predecessor, but it offers faster page rendering and 25% better battery life. The catalog of books available on both Kindles has now swelled from about 90,000 in 2007 to over 230,000 today, and titles still typically cost around $10. You can still subscribe to periodicals and blogs, and there is still a crude Web browser built in — but this gadget is mainly for reading books.

Like its predecessor, the new Kindle has a built-in cellular wireless modem that allows you to download books or update periodicals on the fly, without using a computer. As before, there is no monthly fee for this wireless service.

Most important, Amazon (AMZN) has remedied the most irritating flaws of the original model. It’s no longer easy to accidentally turn pages, because the page-turning buttons have been redesigned. You no longer have to reach around to the back of the device to turn it on or off. You no longer scroll through menus and text with an odd little wheel whose progress was only visible in a thermometer-like strip separate from the main window. And the book-like cover no longer falls off.

But the improvements in this dedicated e-book reader, while admirable, may pale beside Amazon’s next move. Amazon says it is working to make the Kindle e-book catalog available on other mobile devices, such as smart phones, that people already own. The online merchant, which is so secretive it makes Steve Jobs seem like Joe Biden, isn’t saying which devices will get the Kindle service or when. I would bet it will be sooner rather than later.

Amazon’s Kindle 2

This makes perfect sense. While the Kindle project has often been compared with Apple’s iPod, because both are hardware devices seamlessly connected to online-content stores, there is a fundamental difference. Apple (AAPL) offers content to sell hardware. Amazon offers the Kindle to sell content.

If, say, this electronic content were available not only on the Kindle reader, but via Kindle software apps on Apple’s iPhone or the BlackBerry, the e-book market could explode.

Meanwhile, Kindle’s design has gone from chunky and clunky to smooth and sleek. The power switch is now easily reachable on top of the device, and the all-important buttons for paging forward and backward through a book are now smaller — and work by pushing them firmly inward toward the screen instead of outward toward the edge of the device. This means they can no longer be easily activated by stray finger movements.

The weird thermometer system has been replaced by a little joystick that moves an on-screen cursor. The Home button is now large, and has been moved off the keyboard, which has been reduced in size, but is still quite usable.

The screen is the same 6-inch, high-resolution E-Ink display, which has a comforting contrast ratio for reading and uses battery power only when you turn the page. But, while it still can’t display color and still can’t be read in the dark, its gray-shade graphics are much more detailed.

The battery is now sealed in, but it is larger. Amazon claims you can read for four or five days with the wireless turned on, or up to two weeks with it turned off. In my tests, those claims proved true. I took the Kindle on a trip for a week with the wireless turned off and the battery indicator barely budged.

Memory has been greatly expanded, so you can store 1,500 books, up from 200, though you can no longer add extra memory.

There are also a few cool new features. The Kindle 2 looks up words in the dictionary automatically, as soon as you move the cursor to them. It can optionally read books aloud in a computer voice that’s surprisingly decent. And, if the wireless function is on, the Kindle service will remember the last page you read in a book and synchronize a second Kindle to that same place in the book.

There are some drawbacks. You still can’t organize your books into groups of your choice. Amazon now charges $29 for the cover, which was formerly free. And the Kindle still doesn’t work with some of the open e-book formats that other devices support.

But for serious book readers who are tired of toting around stacks of books and periodicals, the new Kindle is finally a pleasure to use.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Shortcovers, Iceberg Put Latest e-Books On Your Cellphone

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:04:07 +0000

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been a solid success. The device can access a catalog of over 200,000 digital books, including most current best sellers, according to Amazon (AMZN). Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.

[ See post to watch video ]

In recent months, e-book offerings have especially exploded on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which, like the Kindle, have excellent screens and an easy and well-organized system for directly downloading content. Apple’s App Store, which carries everything from games to business software, has hundreds of e-book offerings (in addition to the audio books available through the iTunes store).

Some of these e-book apps, or programs, constitute just a single book, while others are digital-reading portals that can access anywhere from a handful of e-book titles, like the collected works of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes tales, to many thousands of titles.

Two of the most popular e-book apps for the iPhone and the Touch are Stanza and eReader. They are pretty basic and straightforward, with little in the way of fancy formatting. But they get the job done, allowing you to download tens of thousands of titles from a variety of sources.

But, as with past cellphone or PDA e-book systems, most of those on the iPhone and Touch focus primarily on older, classic, or out-of-copyright titles, rather than on the sort of current, in-demand titles available on the Kindle. Some fresher titles are available, but the selection of popular books is relatively thin.

Now, two companies are launching new e-book apps that aim to bring current and popular titles from major publishers to the iPhone and Touch. And they add interesting features, including fancy formatting and community tools. I’ve been testing both.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

I found that reading books from these two services was OK, but not nearly as satisfying as reading them on a dedicated, large-screen device like the Kindle, which also offers free excerpts. But it was more convenient. I was able to knock off a chapter or a few pages while commuting or waiting in line. The apps use the iPhone’s touch features to allow you to navigate.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,” current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and blog posts and magazine articles.

Iceberg’s claim to fame is its handsome appearance. It has just 14 titles available now, including the “Eragon” fantasy trilogy, and each must be downloaded as a separate app, which risks cluttering your iPhone with icons. The company is promising thousands of titles eventually, and has signed deals with major publishers. Prices hover around $10 or $11, but range to $27.

Books by Iceberg try to preserve the formatting and pagination of the printed title, and stress easy skimming to any page, searching and annotating. Pages are tinted and flip with a visual effect that apes a physical page-turn.

But there are missing features in both. Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.

The iPhone isn’t primarily an e-book reader, and these new apps still can’t match Kindle’s full catalog. But they add yet another dimension to a very versatile gadget.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Amazon's Kindle Makes Buying E-Books Easy, Reading Them Hard

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:01:00 +0000

See Corrections & Amplifications item below.

Companies have failed for many years to produce a successful electronic reader, a dedicated device that would do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music — allow you to carry around large numbers of titles and enjoy them in a convenient way.

Just a year ago, Sony took another stab at this concept with a product called the Sony Reader. Like the iPod, it was linked to an online store where you could buy thousands of titles that could be downloaded to the Reader. Unlike the iPod, it hasn’t been a hit with consumers, partly because the store was hard to use and had a very limited selection.

Now, the biggest name in online book sales, Amazon.com, is entering the fray with a $400 electronic book reader called Kindle that aims to succeed by offering a much better shopping experience.

The Kindle is the first e-book reader that allows you to select, buy and download titles directly to the device, instead of downloading them to a PC first and then transferring them over. Amazon is offering a large collection of digitized books — about 90,000 — compared with fewer than 25,000 for Sony. The Kindle also can download newspapers, magazines and blogs directly, and update them automatically. This is possible because the Kindle comes with free, built-in wireless Internet access, using a cellular data network.

I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300.

Like the Sony, the Amazon reader uses a high-contrast, but low-power, screen technology. The Kindle’s six-inch screen can display only monochrome text and gray images, and there’s lag time and a flash of black every time you turn a page. But I did find that the screen was good enough to make me forget I wasn’t reading the book on paper.

[ See post to watch video ]

The Kindle holds about 200 titles in its internal memory, and can accept memory cards for storing more books, periodicals and blogs. You can also keep and read some types of personal files and photos on the Kindle, but you have to email them to Amazon for conversion to a proprietary Kindle format.

The battery lasted me a couple of days between charges with the wireless on, longer if I switched it off.

Using the well-organized Kindle store, I was able to purchase books like “Boom!” by Tom Brokaw, “Stone Cold” by David Baldacci and “American Creation” by Joseph Ellis. The process was fast and simple, partly because the Kindle comes preconfigured with your existing Amazon account information.

New releases and bestsellers cost $9.99 each, compared with a typical Amazon price of $15 to $20 for the paper volumes. Prices for other books vary widely, but are generally cheaper than the paper versions.

I also successfully subscribed to electronic editions of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time magazine, and several blogs and news feeds. This was a much less satisfying experience. The layout of these publications was much clumsier and harder to use than on the Web, and they cost more. Blogs and periodicals that are free on the Web cost anywhere from 99 cents to $14 a month.

The Kindle has some nice software features. It includes a small keyboard that lets you make notes in the margins of books and perform searches. There’s also a built-in dictionary.

But the device is poorly designed. It has huge buttons on both edges for turning pages forward or backward. They are way too easy to press accidentally, so my reading was constantly being interrupted by unwanted page turns. Plus, the buttons are confusing. One called “Back” doesn’t actually move to the previous page, but supposedly to the prior function. I never could predict what it would do.

The “Home” button for returning to the list of content on your Kindle is tiny and located at the very bottom of the keyboard. There is no button to take you to the online store; you have to open a menu and scroll. The book-like cover, intended to protect the device, attaches so weakly that it’s always falling off. And because the power buttons are hidden on the back, reaching around to use them practically guarantees you’ll knock off the cover.

The software interface also is clumsy. There is no way to organize titles into groups or categories, so you have to keep turning pages in the Home area to find a particular item to read. And doing many tasks requires you to scroll a barely visible silver cursor along a narrow side panel.

Also, there is no way to email friends to tell them about books or articles, send excerpts or links, or even buy them a Kindle title as a gift.

Amazon has nailed the electronic-book shopping experience. But it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Corrections & Amplifications

The Amazon Kindle is the first electronic book reader that allows users to download books via wireless broadband, without a PC. This column erroneously said it was the first to allow such direct book downloading via any means. Some early attempts at electronic book readers had built-in wired phone modems for downloading books.