So here it is, a few days after my post about the Kindle/1984 fiasco, and as karma would have it, Nicholson Baker (one of my favorite writers) has a lengthy essay about the Kindle in the New Yorker. Being a lover of books and interested in the future thereof as Amazon would have it, he decided to buy one and try it out.
His impression? Generally negative. He discusses the development and evolution of the Kindle’s e-ink technology, the various iterations of the device itself, the handicaps imposed by DRM (though he doesn’t directly attack DRM by name), and, most importantly, the reading experience itself. He strives mightily to be fair, comparing Kindle editions to paper and making a point of reading an entire novel on the thing. But, generally, he seems to find the task to be most unpleasant:
I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
This largely jibes with my own encounters with the Kindle. It’s usable, but that’s all. The contrast is unacceptably low, and the (non-backlit) screen is often dim and washed out. I haven’t tried to read an entire book on it, but honestly, I don’t want to.
Not to mention that anything involving graphics suffers terribly; Baker goes on about this at some length. Charts, maps, illustrations of all kinds are largely deleted; where they do exist, they’re muddled and difficult to read. This would seem to be a problem for one of Amazon’s target markets: students. Yes, textbooks are heavy and inconvenient. But if you’re going to create a device to replace them, you’d better provide functionality as good or better. Students need useful illustrations, and if the Kindle can’t provide them, it’s going to be hard for them to justify the expense.
Finally, Baker talks an awful lot about newspapers (one of his pet interests, as anyone knows who’s read his Double Fold). The Kindle, particularly the large-size DX, advertises itself as the salvation of newspapers. But according to Baker, it instead leaches out all that is enjoyable about newspapers:
It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
Baker does admit, at the end, that after some effort he was finally able to engross himself in one book enough to read it all the way through. But it wasn’t easy for him, and I really don’t have the patience to push myself that far. Not when I could just get the damn thing on paper and save myself a lot of trouble–not to mention money, when you factor in the initial cost of the reader.
Thanks, but no thanks. Yes, books are heavy, and hard to store, and a massive pain in the ass to move. But I won’t be trading them for a Kindle anytime soon.
