Why I like the Kindle, even though it’s not going to keep me from buying real books

There you have it, grown-ups: books aren’t dying, and those damn kids with their Amazon e-book readers still like to read on real paper (even if it’s been decades since any publisher used actual movable type).

I’ve spent a week with my new Kindle 2. I’ve read an actual book on it (the Cluetrain Manifesto), and I even enjoyed it!

Bound books aren’t going anywhere, but the Kindle does do a few things that analog pages can’t:

• Real-time dictionary searches. Highlight a word and the built-in dictionary will look it up for you–straightforward. The cool thing is that you can search Wikipedia and Google with no extra effort. Kudos to Amazon for paying attention to how digital readers look things up.
• All my annotations in one place. The Kindle lets me add bookmarks, highlight passages, and add annotate. The cool thing is that I can see all my notes in one spot, and if I’m feeling extra nerdy, I can transfer them to my computer via USB.
• No paper! Any student reads a ton of PDF articles. Nice not to waste pulp! The screen gets rave reviews from everyone I show it to. So much better than an LCD. (”But wait,” you say, “the Kindle 2 can’t read PDFs. You have to convert them to an e-book format!” Not so, actually. The Kindle runs on Linux, and it’s pretty easy to adjust the firmware to make it understand PDFs. More on that soon, in another post.)

Things that kind of annoy me:

• The operating system is really rudimentary. It’s slow and the design isn’t great. I bet this will improve in future versions.
• Lack of native PDF support. See above.
• No RSS reader. I can read blogs via the built-in “experimental” browser, but it’s slow (3G network) and frustrating. I ended up paying $1.99/month for the New York Times.

Well, I still like it, and it’s easy to read on. It’ll be great for travelling. Lugging around a pile of books isn’t so great.

And my wishlist:

• Foreign language dictionaries. How cool would it be to highlight a word and get an instant translation? It took me an hour or two of browser hacking to get Firefox to do that, and I still can’t read on a computer screen for that long. Anybody who’s studied a foreign language knows how useful that would be.
• Better OS. Obviously. The user experience should be just as good as books.
• DRM-free. “Get a job and a haircut, you Free Culture–reading pirate. Free markets give us incentives to create, and freeloaders ruin everything.” Except for writing, right? Who was the last writer you talked to who makes any kind of money? Kay, fine. There are some. Let’s compromise: no DRM protection on Kindle books that I buy and want to preserve.
• Put my paper books on my Kindle. Like so: I scan the bar code on my books with my MacBook’s camera; your software recognizes the ISBN number; and a digital version gets sent to my Kindle. (If there’s no bar code, the book is probably in the public domain anyway.) It’s not so far-fetched: last week, TechCrunch reported that you can do just that to add your books to your personal Google Books library.

For the most part, the Kindle is still a bit of a toy. A world with only Kindles and no crackling, breaking spines and yellowing pages–that would be a sad world indeed. But thank God I don’t have to read articles and free books on a computer monitor anymore.