Advice for Small Business Owners

Product Review: Amazon Kindle

By Elie Kochman on January 6th, 2010

I was recently given two Kindles by a client as part of a project, and in the process, was able to play around a fair bit with both the large and small Kindle. (For those who are aware, only the smaller of the Kindles is available here in Canada right now, and I had to get the Kindles shipped to me from the US.)

I’ve had the readers for about 6 weeks now, which is more than enough time to discover the joys and, unfortunately, the flaws in the product. However, I’ll let my experience speak for itself.

I first tried reading a normal book on the devices, and found it to be a joy, especially while commuting. I’m not a big fan of writing in books, so the annotation feature and the fact that it’s a tiny, difficult to use keyboard don’t really matter to me. Even while wearing gloves, I could still navigate smoothly, and found that the device does live up the expectation of easy reading in all lighting conditions.

The smaller device is more compact, and therefor my first choice while commuting. However, with only a 6-inch screen, not much text can fit there at once, meaning that you need to scroll constantly to the next screen. The larger version is much larger, and therefore fits more text, but I didn’t like holding it the whole time. (What can I say? I’m lazy, and find the extra few ounces to be too much. Plus, there’s the jostling on the train to deal with, and I’m worried about dropping it.)

What really bugged me, though, is the lack of foreign language support. I wanted to load a text with a mix of English and Hebrew in it, but found that the only way to do that would be to generate a PDF from it, which are not as versatile as generating content in the Amazon format. To me, this one point pushed me to look at other options. Unfortunately, though, Amazon is not alone in its lack of support for foreign languages, and my guess is that it’s only a matter of time before the devices get a software update to support this as well.

For the curious, the screen uses something called digital ink, which means that it’s not affected by ambient light conditions. The larger Kindle can hold about 3,500 books, and the smaller can hold about 1,500. The battery is pretty good, lasting about a week when reading for several hours a day (sorry, I can’t get more specific, as I have not measured it). It connects to the 3G network for downloading content, and you can shop for additional material directly from the Kindle, or order material from the Amazon website and it will be delivered to your Kindle.

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