Having used my Kindle 2 for a couple of days, I can offer some thoughts on it. There are lots of reviews of the device around the place so I will focus on one aspect that is close to home – how it functions as an e-reader for newspapers.
This is not intended as the Kindle’s main use, which is to read electronic versions of books. However, you can subscribe to various papers and magazines, including the FT, and they are wirelessly delivered every morning. In the FT’s case, since the Kindle is currently a US-only device, it is the US edition.
I took out two-week trial subscriptions to the FT, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Incidentally, the ranking of the most popular subscriptions on Kindle is as follows:
1. New York Times
2. Wall Street Journal
3. USA Today
4. Financial Times
5. Washington Post
6. International Herald Tribune
7. Los Angeles Times
8. Chicago Tribune
9. Politico
10. Investor’s Business Daily
I suppose this indicates, not surprisingly, that there is a bias in Kindle subscriptions towards work use, which pushes up the popularity of the FT and Investor’s Business Daily.
Overall, I find reading papers on the Kindle quite convenient in various ways but I think that both Amazon and the newspapers themselves have some more work to do before it becomes an adequate substitute for the paper and online versions.
I will rank the good things first:
1. Convenience.
The paper gets delivered to you wherever you are, rather than to your house. Most of the time this does not make much difference but it can be very convenient if you are on a trip (providing it is within the US, since the wireless coverage does not extend internationally).
Apart from this, the Kindle is small and easily handled when you are on the move. That means, for example, that you can read it quite easily while on an exercise machine at a gym (where I was this morning). That is easier that struggling to turn and fold a broadsheet paper while working out.
It is also useful if you are standing up on a New York subway car (as I was yesterday). Again, you can flick through articles easily without wrestling with papers.
2. Ease of reading
The Kindle is really quite a good device to read things on. The electronic paper display, once you get used to it, is much more restful on the eyes than a backlit computer or BlackBerry screen. I found that I was able to concentrate on reading some articles better on a Kindle than on newsprint.
3. Clippings
Marking an article you want to return to in a paper involves scrawling on it with a pen and keeping that copy with you. The Kindle has various ways of highlighting and annotating text. The easiest and simplest is just adding it to your clippings and looking them up later.
4. Searching.
You can search the paper electronically, looking for company names or other things. That can work better, and is more flexible, than relying on the editors’ lists of stories.
5. Archiving and storage
The Kindle files away back copies of the papers you read for several days before deleting them from the device.
And here are the bad things, or things that could be improved:
1. Lack of timeliness.
To state the obvious, the Kindle version is like the paper version in being delivered to you only once a day. It lacks the constant updating of news organisations’ internet sites. I suppose it could be improved by having, for example, end-of-day updates.
2. Navigation.
This is the big one. No technology that I know of rivals paper for ease of navigation. You can look through headlines before deciding to read a selection of articles efficiently and quickly. The Kindle 2 has a better navigation system than the first Kindle but is still a work in progress.
One problem is there are only two layers of navigation. There is a top level summary of the various sections of the paper such as editorials, international news, company news etc, with the number of articles in each section listed alongside.
When you click down one level, you get all the articles in that section one after another. So if you want to know what the 25th article is about, you have to click the “next article” button 25 times.
I felt an acute need for a second level of navigation, with a list of articles in each section by headlines, which would allow you to browse through them. Incidentally, one veteran Kindle user that I spoke to this week said that was his main criticism of the Kindle as a substitute for papers.
This is obviously fixable. However, it seems to require Kindle itself to make changes since all of the three papers I tried out suffered from the same problem, to varying extents. The two-level navigation, which is fine for books, seems to be a feature of the device.
3. Mysteriousness.
When you have finished a paper, you know it because you have rustled your way through it, discarding sections. Since the Kindle remains the same whether you have read one or many articles from a paper, you do not have a sense instinctively of whether you have got through the paper or not.
There is a display on the home screen that give you some sense (with a series of dots) of how far you are through a book or a magazine. But it does not seem to work for papers. So you constantly have a slightly guilty sense that you have not really done the work yet.
Or perhaps that is just me.
