Kindled fire burns my paper backs

June 1, 2011

A little warning – this piece is going to read more like a diary entry than a review.

The high point of my recent past was, buying my new Kindle. I’m excited! The best thing is, it took far fewer adjustments to switch from paper books than I thought it would take. And then, there are some useful things you could do in Kindle that you cannot do with a real book

An ancient feature, which is, the ability to change font size, turned out very useful in kindle. I was traveling and, a man sitting next to me in the airplane was trying to read my book and it got really annoying. So, I changed the font size to the smallest available and it was not hard at all for me to read at that size. Text to speech is another cool feature, though I do not plan to use that much. A person I know says, he uses text to speech when driving to work. I think, that is a neat use case. Though, I think, I will not be able to drive when listening to a book.

Now, the most annoying thing with Kindle is, having to deal with the-kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome. I have access to all my books right on my device and also all books I can think of, just a few finger taps away! I do not even need to get up and go to the book shelf to fetch a new book. So, I find myself switching between books way too much. One evening, I spent a great deal of time deciding what to read, started book-hopping (if such a phrase exists) and before I could even finish the first 10 pages of the book I finally picked, fell asleep.

Another annoying thing, which is a close second is, there is no way to turn a bunch of pages to skip them. When I’m re-reading a book, I skip boring parts. In kindle, you only get to traverse the book page by page or go to the index and traverse chapter by chapter. This should be very easy for Amazon to fix.

Yet another thing is – I miss the back cover. Especially, the synopsis at the back. Most people see the back cover after the front cover, before starting to read the book. I do not see why ebooks would not have back covers when they have front covers.

Kindle does make up for its little flaws with excellent portability. And then, there are so many free ebooks and the paid ones are so easily accessible and cost just as much as paper back editions if not lesser. And then, there are e-libraries. It is as easy to read from a kindle as it is to read from a real book. I have read six books so far on my kindle and the e-ink technology totally rocks!

But, I do miss the smell of a book and the sound of turning a page. What? Really! Some books smell particularly good. You would know if you read with books close enough to your nose. But, I have given into the fact that, words in a book are more important than its physical self. I can’t imagine our old book club discussing the smell of an old book versus the smell of a new one, the font, the paper quality, the glossiness of the cover, so on and so forth.