Kindle: first thoughts

After some prevaricating I decided to take the plunge and acquire a Kindle.

The screen is really quite strange, in a good way. It looks closer to paper than a standard screen and, naturally, is purely black and white. The controls are a little smaller than I’m used to (I have no mobile telephone or Blackberry) but easy to get the hang of.

The guide does explain things clearly but is a bit repetitive and probably twice as long as it needs to be. The inclusion of two dictionaries (a corrupted colonial version and an accurate English one) is a simple but excellent feature.

Initially, I’m going to use it for reading the first draft of a story I’ve been writing. That might not sound like a spectacular use of a pricey gadget, but given the alternative is printing off hundreds of pages and then daubing them with four highlighters and a biro it’s pretty handy and saves a lot of space.

I’ve downloaded an MP3 (Queen’s excellent but less well-known ’39), a picture or two and the first six chapters of my aforementioned story. Music-playing falls under the Experimental heading. It’s a crude system but a reasonable addition. Pictures get diminished in size, sadly, by the conversion process, but they still look quite nice. My chapters (originally Word documents) keep some formatting (the titles are larger and underlined) and lose other bits (indented paragraphs and speech is just left-aligned now, and the justified body of text is likewise).

The screen is substantially easier on the eye than a standard PC or TV screen. Text can be varied in font and size, and two people (one man, one woman, both tedious) can be prompted to read the text. Terms can be searched for within a document or all documents, or a definition sought from the dictionary.

There is a web browser but it’s rather clunky. It’s ok if you want to check something quickly but if you’re planning on doing much more then it is insufficient. [In fairness, this really isn’t the Kindle’s point].

So, what are the advantages?

Space is the big one. It’s very thin and no larger in breadth and length than a standard paperback. If you’re a frequent flyer or buy numerous books which would be just as good in an electronic format, it will probably prove value for money.

It’s also convenient, and in many instances cheaper than getting physical books. This won’t affect most people, but for me personally it’s quite nice reading my stuff on a Kindle rather than spending ages (I have an old printer) printing stuff out and then reading and marking it with highlighters.

I only got it today so I need to do a bit more with it (downloading an e-Book or two, most obviously) before reaching a firmer conclusion, but so far I’m quite liking it. I also need to work out how to either make my story formatted so I can just transfer files directly to the Kindle, or alter them so that when the automatic Kindle conversion e-mail comes back the formatting isn’t half-lost.

Thaddeus

The Kindle Dilemma

I always intended to get a Kindle. Though expensive as a single purchase, it may well pay for itself through free books and cut price electronic versions of modern ones. The concept is highly convenient, allowing for instant purchasing and delivery of books, and there’s room for thousands which also saves tons of space.

And yet…

…there’s something I just don’t like about abandoning real books. I like having something in my life which I don’t need to boot up or load from a disc or charge its battery.

I also worry somewhat about the pricing. How much of the cut cost is just saved labour, and how much means a lower profit margin for authors? I might be worrying about nothing there, but there’s another more certain cause for concern.

When I was a kid, I visited a lot of second hand bookshops when on holiday. Some of my favourite books came from such places, including some Dr Who novels and Dragon Wing, the first part of the Death Gate Cycle. Independent bookstores are already struggling to compete against the might of Amazon. A world of electronic books and electronic readers is a place without any need for bookshops. I don’t doubt some would survive, and maybe real books would become more luxurious hardbacks with higher price tags, but a rush to electronic books and readers cannot be good for actual bookshops.

There’s also an issue over control: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8314092.stm

I’ve got the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my desk, and very nice it is too. I could lend it to a friend, scribble notes in the margins, use it to steady a wobbly chair leg or find Ed Balls and thrash him about the head with it. It’s mine. But if I downloaded it (and I think it’s free or very cheap to download) it could disappear without my say so or knowledge. It’s rather ironic that Amazon accidentally deleted 1984, of all books, from Kindles a few years ago and highlights the point.

It’s not a one way street, though. The Kindle and similar devices could help break down the agent/publisher barrier between prospective authors and the book-buying public. Getting an agent/publisher is very hard, and acts as quality control but may also deprive the market of some real talent. Even highly successful authors are typically declined numerous times. With more and more people taking advantage of e-Readers we could see the market flooded with aspiring but less talented authors, or have the public, rather than agents, pick winners as almost anyone can publish for themselves electronically.

I don’t think the Kindle’s going away. But I’m also very unsure about whether I want to get one. I like technology, but the pervasiveness of it displeases me.

For now, I’m not buying an e-Reader. The next things I’ll be ordering from Amazon are three paperbacks.

Thaddeus

E-Books: boon or bane for authors?

The Kindle was the number 1 bestselling item for Amazon last Christmas. It’s an e-Reader, one of a range that has recently sprung up and allows people to read books electronically.

The Kindle’s screen has improved resolutions, to stop people’s eyes going all fuzzy, sizeable memory and free internet access almost anywhere (if you buy the pricier version) enabling quick access to download new books.

Older works, due to copyright expiration, are free, which is pretty fantastic. I’m going to get one, probably in April, and look forward to seeing how good it is.

The Kindle and other e-Readers enable people to buy and receive books very rapidly, save on storage space and receive a huge number of older books entirely free of charge. If you’re a lover of classics, an e-Reader will probably pay for itself pretty quickly.

They do more than just speed up the process of buying, however. E-Readers enable writers to give away first chapters, or appendices, for free to help entice full scale purchases. They also make a chip in the dam of the agent/publisher barrier. Getting an agent, let alone a publisher, is difficult (perhaps especially so in sci-fi/fantasy). The advent of e-Readers and e-Books means aspiring authors can sell directly to potential buyers, through collective sites or their own blogs, or even through Amazon itself.

There are two problems with this, and they’re pretty big. The first is essentially identical to the digital music problem. Once information, whether musical or written, is encoded digitally and can be transmitted in that way it can be easily stolen and distributed free of charge (albeit illegally). The music industry struggled for years with this, but whereas musicians can perform live gigs to hundreds or thousands of people authors don’t have an equivalent outlet.

I’d like to think, being an avid reader, that people who love books and follow certain authors would not stoop (in large numbers) to theft. The best books are immersive and thrilling and often emotional, and if you take it for free then authors will take a financial hit and may stop selling e-Books altogether (although pirate e-Books may arise).

The second problem is an electronic version of the difficulty all aspiring authors face anyway. I’d bet a week’s wages to a dead mouse that Joe Abercrombie or George RR Martin could shift more copies of a new e-Book in a week than a new, unknown author could in a year. Getting the media attention necessary to sell books, in physical or electronic form, is very hard for new writers. I’ve been wondering about how to encourage more regular readers (beyond the obvious planting of shirtless photographs displaying my rippling torso) myself.

There’s also the question of whether the current model of writing fiction ought to continue indefinitely, be entirely replaced, or whether a new model can exist alongside. For example, an author (aspiring or published) releasing a new book tends to charge X amount for it. The money is paid, the download of physical copy handed over, and the reader gets to keep it.

But what if books became serialised? It’s often said that a book should have a certain number and regularity of exciting moments to keep people interested. The serialisation format (with either a smaller amount paid per episode or a certain total in donations needing to be raised before the next episode is released) could work well online, but it could mean that an author would only make a finite amount for their book (in the latter example it would become free after a certain total had been donated by readers).

Despite the success of the e-Reader and the potential of new technology I am certain physical books will still be bought. Even after I get my Kindle, I’ll be buying a smaller number of physical books.

Thaddeus