Kindle Wireless Reading Device $259.00 FREE Two-Day Shipping from Amazon!
Kindle Wireless Reading Device User Review
By: Don Blohowiak “Lead Well® Institute”
Kindle Wireless Reading Device 2 as a Researcher’s Tool
There are plenty of reviews here (more than 1500 and counting as I write this) about the basic functions of the product. This review looks at the device’s performance as a research aid to a doctoral student (who’s also an author and former executive in his 50s).
READING JOURNAL ARTICLES FROM PDF
I wanted the unit for reading many journal articles that I currently print from PDF downloads for my PhD studies, in addition to having many books available in the Kindle Wireless Reading Device form factor.
As Amazon did not see fit to equip the Kindle Wireless Reading Device with a native PDF reader (royalty payments to Adobe issue? technical impediment?), I tried three methods for getting PDFs into the Kindle Wireless Reading Device:
1. Sending PDFs to Amazon via email for free conversion
2. Converting PDFs via the open source program Calibre
3. Converting PDFs via the beta version of Stanza (I’m on a Mac)
Results:
Some Amazon PDF file conversions are beautiful. Some look like they were generated by a random page generator — with text placed randomly, images of full pages from the original document randomly scattered among the text, and so on.
Some PDFs’ tables of contents DID work as a navigable set of links. And some did not.
Perhaps this has something to do with the version of the PDF encoder used to create the PDF file. And this may again argue for a more authentic, native PDF reader rather than using a conversion method as the mechanism for displaying PDF documents on the Kindle.
In fairness, a straight, one column text-only chapter from a textbook converted from PDF quite nicely. And Amazon has been swift (seconds to minutes) in returning the file conversions by email.
More complex journal articles, with multiple columns, tables, and diagrams fared poorly in all the conversions from Amazon, and by Calibre and Stanza. And, again, in fairness, Amazon does warn that its automated conversion process may yield poor results. And this roll-the-dice approach to PDF conversion is annoying to someone who would like to rely on it.
Some hope may lie in an announcement on Calibre’s web site that it is planning to come out with multi-column PDF conversion capability in an upcoming release.
Also adding to the PDF gamble, for reasons unknown, a very simple straight text document sent to Amazon for conversion to the AZW file format refused to open on the Kindle as an unrecognized file.
Equally baffling and disappointing, a set of PDF books — with a searchable text layer obtained from The Internet Archive — were “converted” by Amazon only into a set of page images, in landscape orientation no less. The documents were basically unreadable, and unsearchable, on the Kindle. These PDFs definitely had a searchable text layer as I tested for that before sending them for conversion.
OTHER DOCUMENTS
A text-only document, a bibliography, saved in the “universal” word processing file format (.rtf) transferred directly from my computer to the Kindle 2 was NOT read by the Kindle Wireless Reading Device. RTF is not listed as a supported file type; I was just hoping here…
Another RTF file, in this case an academic paper, was sent to Amazon to be converted. The converted version displayed beautifully.
It sure would be nice for the As Amazon did not see fit to equip the Kindle Wireless Reading Device with a native PDF reader (royalty payments to Adobe issue? technical impediment?), I tried three methods for getting PDFs into the Kindle Wireless Reading Device to natively display RTF or DOC documents, in addition to PDF, without conversion.
NOTE TAKING
For typing and navigating, the e-ink technology takes patience and a little getting used to — especially for frenetic folks in task mode. Three reasons: 1) the ink takes a moment to display on the screen after your input from the keyboard or navigation contoller; 2) the keyboard input is stiff and requires a direct punch on the very tiny keys to register; 3) the keyboard is so close to the bottom of the unit, and the Kindle Wireless Reading Device
is so flexible, typing is something of a laborious or even tortured action for relatively short notes such as this paragraph actually written on the Kindle Wireless Reading Device
2.
HIGHLIGHTING
Others have written here about the UNannounced limits on both highlighting and copying from books purchased from Amazon. As a published author, I have no problem with limits on copying. However, not providing a warning that the limit is approaching, OR that it has been reached (!) seems borderline incompetent. Equally strange and indefensible — if this is true, and I don’t have my own experience with this yet — putting highlighting into the same category as copying, as if highlighting infringes on copyright. Would someone please explain that one to those of us who honor authors by making a point to draw our own attention to their words via highlighting.
CONTENT ORGANIZATION
It does seem curious that a device with two gigabytes of storage has so limited a scheme for organizing the hundreds and even thousands of bits of content that Amazon expects you to acquire — as both the capacity and the product’s manual indicate. (It is also quite curious that Amazon, with its own proprietary search engine, has provided no way to search its community forums. But that is a rabbit hole for another day…)
Yes, you can list your content by author, title and date added, but that is very limited. I’ve had my Kindle 24 hours and have nearly 150 works on it. At ten titles per page (NOT configurable!), that’s 15 pages of titles to scroll through, and I have a GIG and a HALF of storage memory yet to go!
Yes, there are work-arounds, such as doing a kludgy self-designed tagging system with Notes-to-self as suggested by others elsewhere in the forums you can’t search here. (See comment above.)
SAMPLE NONFICTION
A third of the non-fiction works that I have so far sampled came without a table of contents. While I do appreciate the foreword, acknowledgements, copyright pages and the like, in making a purchase decision for non-fiction, a table of contents seems like a minimum requirement. This, I suspect is myopia on the part of publishers, not Amazon. But Amazon doesn’t put the TOC for Kindle books on its web site the way it makes them available for so many print products. Frustrating and a disincentive for impulse purchasing. When in doubt, I don’t buy.
BOTTOM LINE
The device shows early promise. Even in its second generation, the Kindle Wireless Reading Device is still quite rough for some basic functionality beyond putting words on the screen. To justify the purchase price, those functions really need to be there. I’m not yet sure if I’m keeping mine. But I sure can imagine how swell this thing would be to work with if these short-comings were addressed. And I sure do hope they are.
About the Author
Kindle Wireless Reading Device Highly Recommend!
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