The Kindle 2 Won’t Save Newspapers
The first thing I do every morning is look outside a window, to spy the New York Times and Seattle Times, safe and dry, usually in the NYT’s blue plastic bag, sitting on my porch. Then I turn off my home alarm and retrieve them. All this, before making my first cup of coffee.
Nowadays, there is an extra step to my top-of-the-morning routine: I shuffle over to my coffee table, slide on my Kindle 2 and check to see if the day’s editions of a trio of Timeses (Seattle, New York and Los Angeles), as well as the Washington Post, have been delivered via Whispernet. So far, so good. As I would hardly blame the amazing delivery person who leaves my newspapers wrapped and easily retrievable every morning, I won’t ding Amazon’s Sprint-based, 3G delivery mechanism for the Kindle’s shortcomings in its alternative to the tree-killing, death-rattling print editions of U.S. edition.
First, the good to great: Text on the Kindle 2 is crystal, eye-massagingly clear; the device is thin, light and portable, and navigation (especially to the Amazon Store, no surprise) is easy and intuitive. I’m a huge gadget guy, so the thing gets major kudos for being cool and innovative. I hadn’t planned on reading books, since I love the physical presence of bound pages and bold covers, but I may try a few because of the crispness of the text, the fact that you can bookmark pages, highlight passages and insert notes (if the only the Kindle were around when I was in grad school). I even don’t mind the text-to-speech features that others have criticized as being too robotic (ever listen to a Garmin GPS device?).
