Gadgets

Posted by Tom Manos on March 13, 2009, 9:45 AM EDT

Ok, I admit it, I'm a bit of a gadget freak.

I guess the gadget that really changed my life in a big way is the MP3 player. Mine is an Apple iPod, and it's hard for me to overemphasize how it's changed my way of thinking about music.

But that's a subject I'll leave for another post. Today I want to talk about my newest gadget: The Amazon Kindle 2.

For many years, I've been resistant to "reading" on an electronic device. I never really got comfortable reading the newspaper online, and I've always disliked the feel of reading a book on a computer or a handheld. Until now.

The Kindle has the potential to fundamentally change my way of thinking about reading the way the iPod changed how I think about music. It's the first device I've found that to a large degree preserves the "feel" of reading a hard-copy book, but provides tremendous additional benefit.

Here are some of the features I find most attractive:

• The Kindle feels and reads more like a real book than anything else I've seen. Page turns, while not instantaneous, are crisp.
• The display is incredible. The E Ink technology is as close to reading a paper page as I can imagine. There is no backlighting, and glare is not a problem. Unlike a laptop display, it's perfectly readable in bright sunlight, though because there is no backlight, you do need some ambient lighting or a book light at night, in bed.
• The number of books you can keep in the 2GB internal storage is extraordinary. Maybe a couple of thousand books: way more than most people will need. And if you need to save space for some reason, you can keep them offline.
• The number of books available is pretty impressive, somewhere near 250,000. Amazon is working towards getting every book ever printed available for the device. They have work to do.
• You can create your own books from a variety of original formats: pdf, html, word, text, and maybe a couple of others. With the availability of free conversion utilities, it should be simple to get any kind of document onto the device. I've converted dozens of old technical manuals to Kindle format and installed them on the device.
• There's a ton of extra capabilities provided by the Kindle, most of which I have yet to fully explore: bookmarks, annotations, dictionary lookups, Wikipedia lookups, and probably a couple of others I've forgotten.

All in all, these features and a great piece of hardware provide a reading experience that is very close to "the real thing", with lots of perks. After just three weeks, it's already changed the way I read and think about books.

I won't suggest it's perfect - there are places where the Kindle can improve. But it's eminently useful today and in my opinion has no serious flaws.

This one is a keeper.