[ExI] Newsweek: The Future of Reading

[PJ Manney]

I'm sure you all know about Amazon's release of the Kindle, but this
article is a better than usual puff piece that uses the Kindle to
re-examine e-publishing.

In the second article, "Can It Kindle the Imagination?" Newsweek gave
the Kindle a pretty good review as a substantial improvement in the
technology.  Its biggest gripe was its copy protection issues and the
price.  Based on the review, I'd have to try one out and love it
before I invested $400, but I suspect I'll wait for the inevitably
improved and cheaper version(s).  I have no need to be an early
adopter -- I'm doing the same with the iPhone.  ;-)

PJ

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

The Future of Reading
Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes
he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book
itself.

By Steven Levy
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 12:53 PM ET Nov 17, 2007
"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that
was invented after you were born." So it's not surprising, when making
mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our
lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed,
wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately
than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book. It is a more reliable storage
device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface.
(No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is
instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so
perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with
indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant
Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he
uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his
mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store
for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom
glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking
their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books
professionally and personally—he's a big reader, and his wife is a
novelist—he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf
all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a
conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former
VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest
virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and
short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web.
But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is
releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will
leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning
point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a
revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers
read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a
milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing
industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on
the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of
print culture, and Norman Mailer's recent death underlined the dearth
of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are
vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a
chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.

As well placed as Amazon was to jump into this scrum and maybe move
things forward, it was not something the company took lightly. After
all, this is the book we're talking about. "If you're going to do
something like this, you have to be as good as the book in a lot of
respects," says Bezos. "But we also have to look for things that
ordinary books can't do." Bounding to a whiteboard in the conference
room, he ticks off a number of attributes that a book-reading
device—yet another computer-powered gadget in an ever more crowded
backpack full of them—must have. First, it must project an aura of
bookishness; it should be less of a whizzy gizmo than an austere
vessel of culture. Therefore the Kindle (named to evoke the crackling
ignition of knowledge) has the dimensions of a paperback, with a
tapering of its width that emulates the bulge toward a book's binding.
It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not
run hot or make intrusive beeps. A reading device must be sharp and
durable, Bezos says, and with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough
technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed
book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages. The battery
has to last for a while, he adds, since there's nothing sadder than a
book you can't read because of electile dysfunction. (The Kindle gets
as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two
hours.) And, to soothe the anxieties of print-culture stalwarts, in
sleep mode the Kindle displays retro images of ancient texts, early
printing presses and beloved authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane
Austen.

But then comes the features that your mom's copy of "Gone With the
Wind" can't match. E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change
the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can
instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold
several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on
a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks
maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle allows you to search within the
book for a phrase or name.

Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices,
notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a
feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity,
via a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband
service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere,
not just Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a
device, it's a service."

Specifically, it's an extension of the familiar Amazon store (where,
of course, Kindles will be sold). Amazon has designed the Kindle to
operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the
store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations,
and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a
thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch
process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it
downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be
devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not
just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this
device in less than a minute," says Bezos.

Amazon has worked hard to get publishers to step up efforts to release
digital versions of new books and backlists, and more than 88,000 will
be on sale at the Kindle store on launch. (Though Bezos won't get
terribly specific, Amazon itself is also involved in scanning books,
many of which it captured as part of its groundbreaking Search Inside
the Book program. But most are done by the publishers themselves, at a
cost of about $200 for each book converted to digital. New titles
routinely go through the process, but many backlist titles are still
waiting. "It's a real chokepoint," says Penguin CEO David Shanks.)
Amazon prices Kindle editions of New York Times best sellers and new
releases in hardback at $9.99. The first chapter of almost any book is
available as a free sample.

The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can
subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues
go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into
your Kindle. (It's much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the
publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a
time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost
either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.

In addition, the Kindle can venture out on the Web itself—to look up
things in Wikipedia, search via Google or follow links from blogs and
other Web pages. You can jot down a gloss on the page of the book
you're reading, or capture passages with an electronic version of a
highlight pen. And if you or a friend sends a word document or PDF
file to your private Kindle e-mail address, it appears in your Kindle
library, just as a book does. Though Bezos is reluctant to make the
comparison, Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading.

The Kindle, shipping as you read this, costs $399. When Bezos
announces that price at the launch this week, he will probably get the
same raised-eyebrow reaction Steve Jobs got in October 2001, when he
announced that Apple would charge that same price for its pocket-size
digital music player. No way around it: it's pricey. But if all goes
well for Amazon, several years from now we'll see revamped Kindles,
equipped with color screens and other features, selling for much less.
And physical bookstores, like the shuttered Tower Records of today,
will be lonelier places, as digital reading thrusts us into an
exciting—and jarring—post-Gutenberg era.

Will the Kindle and its kin really take on a technology that's shone
for centuries and is considered the bedrock of our civilization? The
death of the book—or, more broadly, the death of print—has been
bandied about for well over a decade now. Sven Birkerts, in "The
Gutenberg Elegies" (1994), took a peek at the future and concluded,
"What the writer writes, how he writes and gets edited, printed and
sold, and then read—all the old assumptions are under siege." Such
pronouncements were invariably answered with protestations from
hard-liners who insisted that nothing could supplant those seemingly
perfect objects that perch on our night tables and furnish our rooms.
Computers may have taken over every other stage of the process—the
tools of research, composition and production—but that final mile of
the process, where the reader mind-melds with the author in an
exquisite asynchronous tango, would always be sacrosanct, said the
holdouts. In 1994, for instance, fiction writer Annie Proulx was
quoted as saying, "Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a
twitchy little screen. Ever."

Oh, Annie. In 2007, screens are ubiquitous (and less twitchy), and
people have been reading everything on them—documents, newspaper
stories, magazine articles, blogs—as well as, yes, novels. Not just on
big screens, either. A company called DailyLit this year began sending
out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors
like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks.
(I've been reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson" on my iPhone, a device
that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming
months.) And recently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune waxed
rhapsodically about reading Jane Austen on his BlackBerry.

But taking on the tome directly is the challenge for handheld,
dedicated reading devices, of which the Kindle is only the newest and
most credible effort. An early contender was the 22-ounce Rocket eBook
(its inventors went on to create the electric-powered Tesla roadster).
There were also efforts to distribute e-books by way of CD-ROMs. But
the big push for e-books in the early 2000s fizzled. "The hardware was
not consumer-friendly and it was difficult to find, buy and read
e-books," says Carolyn Reidy, the president of Simon & Schuster.

This decade's major breakthrough has been the introduction of E Ink,
whose creators came out of the MIT Media Lab. Working sort of like an
Etch A Sketch, it forms letters by rearranging chemicals under the
surface of the screen, making a page that looks a lot like a printed
one. The first major implementation of E Ink was the $299 Sony Reader,
launched in 2006 and heavily promoted. Sony won't divulge sales
figures, but business director Bob Nell says the Reader has exceeded
the company's expectations, and earlier this fall Sony introduced a
sleeker second-generation model, the 505. (The Reader has no
wireless—you must download on your computer and then move it to the
device— and doesn't enable searching within a book.)

Now comes the Kindle, which Amazon began building in 2004, and Bezos
understands that for all of its attributes, if one aspect of the
physical book is not adequately duplicated, the entire effort will be
for naught. "The key feature of a book is that it disappears," he
says.

While those who take fetishlike pleasure in physical books may resist
the notion, that vanishing act is what makes electronic reading
devices into viable competitors to the printed page: a subsuming
connection to the author that is really the basis of our book passion.
"I've actually asked myself, 'Why do I love these physical objects?' "
says Bezos. " 'Why do I love the smell of glue and ink?' The answer is
that I associate that smell with all those worlds I have been
transported to. What we love is the words and ideas."

Long before there was cyberspace, books led us to a magical
nether-zone. "Books are all the dreams we would most like to have, and
like dreams they have the power to change consciousness," wrote Victor
Nell in a 1988 tome called "Lost in a Book." Nell coined a name for
that trancelike state that heavy readers enter when consuming books
for pleasure—"ludic reading" (from the Latin ludo, meaning "I play").
Annie Proulx's claim was that an electronic device would never create
that hypnotic state. But technologists are disproving that. Bill Hill,
Microsoft's point person on e-reading, has delved deep into the
mysteries of this lost zone, in an epic quest to best emulate the
conditions on a computer. He attempted to frame a "General Theory of
Readability," which would demystify the mysteries of ludic reading and
why books could uniquely draw you into a rabbit hole of absorption.

"There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's
all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of
the eye to the part of the brain that does the processing [of the
symbols on the page]," says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to
a seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture
on his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he says,
pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a second,
and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does this
repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the
centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this
physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification …
"We have to take the same care for the screen as we've taken for
print."

Hill insists—not surprisingly, considering his employer—that the ideal
reading technology is not necessarily a dedicated e-reading device,
but the screens we currently use, optimized for that function. (He's
read six volumes of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire" on a Dell Pocket PC.) "The Internet Explorer is not a
browser—it's a reader," he says. "People spend about 20 percent of the
time browsing for information and 80 percent reading or consuming it.
The transition has already happened. And we haven't noticed."

But even Hill acknowledges that reading on a televisionlike screen a
desktop away is not the ideal experience. Over the centuries, the
sweet spot has been identified: something you hold in your hand,
something you can curl up with in bed. Devices like the Kindle, with
its 167 dot-per-inch E Ink display, with type set in a serif font
called Caecilia, can subsume consciousness in the same way a physical
book does. It can take you down the rabbit hole.

Though the Kindle is at heart a reading machine made by a
bookseller—and works most impressively when you are buying a book or
reading it—it is also something more: a perpetually connected Internet
device. A few twitches of the fingers and that zoned-in connection
between your mind and an author's machinations can be interrupted—or
enhanced—by an avalanche of data. Therein lies the disruptive nature
of the Amazon Kindle. It's the first "always-on" book.

What kinds of things will happen when books are persistently
connected, and more-evolved successors of the Kindle become
commonplace? First of all, it could transform the discovery process
for readers. "The problem with books isn't print or writing," says
Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail." "It's that not enough
people are reading." (A 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study
reported that only 57 percent of adults read a book—any book—in a
year. That was down from 61 percent a decade ago.) His hope is that
connected books will either link to other books or allow communities
of readers to suggest undiscovered gems.

The connectivity also affects the publishing business model, giving
some hope to an industry that slogs along with single-digit revenue
growth while videogame revenues are skyrocketing. "Stuff doesn't need
to go out of print," says Bezos. "It could shorten publishing cycles."
And it could alter pricing. Readers have long complained that new
books cost too much; the $9.99 charge for new releases and best
sellers is Amazon's answer. (You can also get classics for a song: I
downloaded "Bleak House" for $1.99.) Bezos explains that it's only
fair to charge less for e-books because you can't give them as gifts,
and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can't lend them out or
resell them. (Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for
previous versions of e-books—like the tape in "Mission: Impossible,"
they evaporate after the loan period—and Bezos says that he's open to
the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.)

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm
not going along with it," says Penguin's David Shanks of Amazon's low
price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the
Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he
offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such
books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely.
"We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you
just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced
items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on
the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a
plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for
$10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up
scanning the magazine racks. For argument's sake, let's say cutting
the price in half will double a book's sales—given that the royalty
check would be the same, wouldn't an author prefer twice the number of
readers? When I posed the question to best-selling novelist James
Patterson, who was given an early look at the Kindle, he said that if
the royalty fee were the same, he'd take the readers. (He's also a
believer that the Kindle will succeed: "The baby boomers have a love
affair with paper," he says. "But the next-gen people, in their 20s
and below, do everything on a screen.")

The model other media use to keep prices down, of course, is
advertising. Though this doesn't seem to be in Kindle's plans, in some
dotcom quarters people are brainstorming advertiser-supported books.
"Today it doesn't make sense to put ads in books, because of the
unpredictable timing and readership," says Bill McCoy, Adobe's general
manager of e-publishing. "That changes with digital distribution."

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the
author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be
corrected instantly. Updates, no problem—in fact, instead of buying a
book in one discrete transaction, you could subscribe to a book, with
the expectation that an author will continually add to it. This would
be more suitable for nonfiction than novels, but it's also possible
that a novelist might decide to rewrite an ending, or change something
in the middle of the story. We could return to the era of
Dickens-style serializations. With an always-on book, it's conceivable
that an author could not only rework the narrative for future buyers,
but he or she could reach inside people's libraries and make the
change. (Let's also hope Amazon security is strong, so that we don't
find one day that someone has hacked "Harry Potter" or "Madame
Bovary.")

Those are fairly tame developments, though, compared with the more
profound changes that some are anticipating. In a connected book, the
rabbit hole is no longer a one-way transmission from author to reader.
For better or for worse, there's company coming.

Talk to people who have thought about the future of books and there's
a phrase you hear again and again. Readers will read in public.
Writers will write in public. Readers, of course, are already enjoying
a more prominent role in the literary community, taking star turns in
blogs, online forums and Amazon reviews. This will only increase in
the era of connected reading devices. "Book clubs could meet inside of
a book," says Bob Stein, a pioneer of digital media who now heads the
Institute for the Future of the Book, a foundation-funded organization
based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house. Eventually, the idea goes,
the community becomes part of the process itself.

Stein sees larger implications for authors—some of them sobering for
traditionalists. "Here's what I don't know," he says. "What happens to
the idea of a writer going off to a quiet place, ingesting information
and synthesizing that into 300 pages of content that's uniquely his?"
His implication is that that intricate process may go the way of the
leather bookmark, as the notion of author as authoritarian figure
gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process. "The idea of
authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,"
says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.

This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a
cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John
Battelle ("The Search") and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book
about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the
benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on
their blogs.

"The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship," says Peter
Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an
association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some
writing-in-public advocates, he doesn't spare the novelists. "Michael
Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium," he says.
Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead
of being the sole authority, is a "superuser," the lead wolf of a
creative pack. (Though it's hard to believe that lone storytellers
won't always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned
off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)

All this becomes even headier when you consider that as the e-book
reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to
digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement
(its Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the
first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of
hundreds of thousands of tomes). But as an unabashed bookseller, its
goals are different from those of other players, such as Google—whose
mission is collecting and organizing all the world's information—and
that of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that wants the world's
books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force
behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his
company to Amazon, but is unhappy with the digital-rights management
on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap
XO device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.) There are
tricky, and potentially showstopping, legal hurdles to all this:
notably a major copyright suit filed by a consortium of publishers,
along with the Authors Guild, charging that Google is infringing by
copying the contents of books it scans for its database. Nonetheless,
the trend is definitely to create a back end of a massively connected
library to supply future e-book devices with more content than a city
full of libraries. As journalist Kevin Kelly wrote in a controversial
New York Times Magazine article, the goal is to make "the entire works
of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all
languages, available to all people, all the time."

Google has already scanned a million books from its partner libraries
like the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, and
they are available in its database. (Last week my wife searched for
information about the first English edition of the journals of Pehr
Kalm, a Swedish naturalist traveling in Colonial America. In less than
two seconds, Google delivered the full text of the book, as published
in 1771.)

Paul LeClerc, CEO of the New York Public Library, says that he's
involved in something called the Electronic Enlightenment, a scholarly
project (born at the University of Oxford) to compile all the writings
of and information about virtually every major figure of the
Enlightenment. It includes all the annotated writings, correspondence
and commentary about 3,800 18th-century writers like Jefferson,
Voltaire and Rousseau, completely cross-linked and searchable—as if a
small room in a library were compressed to a single living document.
"How could you do that before?" he asks.

Now imagine that for all books. "Reading becomes a community
activity," writes Kelly. "Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers.
Marginalia can be broadcast … In a very curious way, the universal
library becomes one very, very, large single text: the world's only
book."

Google's people have thought about how this connectivity could
actually affect how people read. Adam Smith, product director for Book
Search, says the process is all about "getting rid of the idea that a
book is a [closed] container." One of his colleagues, Dan Lansing,
describes how it might work: "Say you are trying to learn more about
the Middle East, and you start reading a book, which claims that
something happened in a particular event in Lebanon in '81, where the
author was using his view on what happened. But actually his view is
not what [really] happened. There's newspaper clippings on the event,
there are other people who have written about it who disagree with
him, there are other perspectives. The fact that all of that is at
your fingertips and you can connect it together completely changes the
way you do scholarship, or deep investigation of a subject. You'll be
able to get all the world's information, all the books that have been
published, all the world's libraries."

Jim Gerber, Google's content-partnerships director, suggests that it
might be an interesting idea, for example, for someone on the liberal
side of the fence to annotate an Ann Coulter book, providing refuting
links for every contention that the critic thought was an inaccurate
representation. That commentary, perhaps bolstered and updated by
anyone who wants to chime in, could be woven into the book itself, if
you chose to include it. (This would probably make Ann Coulter very
happy, because you'd need to buy her book in order to view the litany
of objections.)

All these ideas are anathema to traditionalists. In May 2006, novelist
John Updike, appalled at reading Kelly's article ("a pretty grisly
scenario"), decided to speak for them. Addressing a convention of
booksellers, he cited "the printed, bound and paid-for book" as an
ideal, and worried that book readers and writers were "approaching the
condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play
in the electric sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." (Actually,
studies show that heavy Internet users read many more books than do
those not on the Net.) He declared that the "edges" of the traditional
book should not be breached. In his view, the stiff boards that bound
the pages were not just covers but ramparts, and like-minded people
should "defend the fort."

That fort will stand, of course, for a very long time. The awesome
technology of original books—and our love for them—will keep them
vital for many years to come. But nothing is forever. Microsoft's Bill
Hill has a riff where he runs through the energy-wasting,
resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down
trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to
another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to
put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship
the thing around the world. "Do you really believe that we'll be doing
that in 50 years?" he asks.

The answer is probably not, and that's why the Kindle matters. "This
is the most important thing we've ever done," says Jeff Bezos. "It's
so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and
improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read." As long as
the batteries are charged.



URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/71251
Can It Kindle the Imagination?
We read the fine print on Amazon's new gadget.

By Steven Levy
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 9:21 AM ET Nov 19, 2007
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the Kindle may be the most important
thing he's ever done. But how well does it work? As the first
journalist to get his hands on the device, I found it fit my hands
pretty well. It's comfortable to hold, and the huge NEXT PAGE and
PREVIOUS PAGE buttons on the sides make it easy to keep reading at a
steady pace. On the other hand, the prominence of those buttons makes
it almost impossible to pick the Kindle up without inadvertently
turning a virtual page.

Navigation through the various features is via a novel system centered
on a clickable "select wheel" that moves a silvery cursor up or down a
slim bar, like an elevator moving through a shaft. It's dead simple to
master, but a little slow.

The real acid test was whether the Kindle was capable of transporting
a reader into that trancelike zone where the world falls away. My
suspicion, since I've had a Sony Reader (which uses the identical E
Ink technology), was that it would, and I was right. I read a Dan
Silva thriller, Richard Russo's new novel and Eric Clapton's
unsatisfying memoir, and didn't feel I was missing anything that I
would have gotten in a "real" book.

It's also exciting to get a daily dose of The New York Times and other
papers. But the interface for newspaper reading is disappointing—you
have to painstakingly go through article lists, and often the stories
are insufficiently described. Still, getting the Times in one burst on
a daily basis, no matter where you are, is closer to getting a
hard-copy delivery than picking out articles on the Web, and it costs
$13.99 a month, compared with the $50-plus I pay for home delivery. Do
the math.

The real innovation of the Kindle is connecting by its wireless
Whispernet, which works well from pretty much everywhere. When you go
to the Kindle store, you are greeted like an old friend, since your
Kindle account is linked to your Amazon buying history and
recommendations. Not every book I wanted was there (paging Philip
Roth), but plenty were, and the $9.99 price for best sellers and new
books makes purchases more attractive. The coolest thing you can do
with a Kindle, hands down, is buying a book—just click BUY and, bang,
you have the book in less than a minute.

Though the copy protection doesn't affect book-reading, it is
limiting, and annoying. You can't print out a passage, e-mail it to a
friend or copy it into a document. You can't lend a book to someone,
or sell it after you're finished.

Searching—inside books, inside the device, in the store and on the
Web—is speedy and easy. You can do Web browsing on a Kindle, but it
doesn't display pages well. (No YouTube, as the device doesn't support
animation.)

I didn't scientifically test the battery life, but I found that when
you're warned that you have only 20 percent of your power left, you
should recharge immediately, because when it goes, it goes quickly,
and there's nothing more frustrating than a device that plays dead.
And yes, you can replace a battery, for about $20.

The Kindle, mainly because it is not just a device but a well-designed
cog in a coherent and useful service, is a high point so far in
electronic reading. Deciding whether it's worth the $399 price tag is
a classic early-adopter question: if history has any validity, you'll
eventually be able to buy an improved version for less. But I'd say
that any voluminous reader, particularly one who travels, would be
delighted to receive a Kindle by the fireplace this holiday season.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/71251