I’m back! I’ve been back for a couple of weeks, in fact, but then the school year started. Plus there was this hurricane. So the blog posts have rather stacked up.
I tried an experiment on this trip: no laptop, just my new Kindle 3, my iPod Touch, a couple of paper books, and a paper journal. As I was traveling alone and gone for over 3 weeks, this was a pretty major leap. My luggage was a hell of a lot less heavy, but how would I talk to friends if I got lonely? I really hate paying for things I will only use once and can’t re-sell or give away (ie., all Kindle materials), so how would I get new things to read or listen to when I wanted them? What if I needed the internet???
It was neither an unqualified success nor an unmitigated disaster. I am here to report the findings to you. In case you don’t want to read the whole post, here’s the verdict.
- Lightweight technology has its uses, but it’s not replacing either full-powered computers or paper anytime soon.
- Libraries need to get their act together electronically. (Not that this is news.) Overdrive has a monopoly on electronic borrowing, and it is an embarrassment. Right now, electronic media is for rich people who can afford to buy all their books at new prices and never re-sell them.
KINDLE: I chose the Kindle over the other e-readers because it has free 3G and a browser. Since I refuse to pay for a fancy phone and a data plan, this seemed like a pretty great deal. And it is a pretty great deal, though to some extent you do get what you pay for.
Pros:
The browser is primitive, but not bad if you don’t have to interact much. I kept up with my blog feeds on Google Reader just fine, mostly. And did I mention free 3G?
It’s a comfortable reading experience (in the sunshine! with a computer screen!).
When I accidentally leaned on one corner getting into bed at night and cracked the screen, Amazon a) had a real person I could talk to, and b) sent me a replacement within a few days, no questions asked.
I like the ability to take in-line notes on what I’m reading.
Good battery life, even online.
The preloaded dictionary worked well and was handy, especially since I was mostly reading free out-of-copyright stuff (read: antiquated language).
Cons:
The browser is slow and crashes frequently, especially when “typing.” The keyboard can’t handle more than a few characters at a time. It was fine for email reading, but responding got painful.
Some books are missing words or whole sections! I only had this problem with the freebies, but I had it pretty consistently. For instance, every time Anne of Green Gables quotes a poem — gone. Presumably it’s formatted as some sort of blockquote that the Kindle couldn’t read. Shoddy, shoddy work, Amazon.
There’s no context available for books offline. Publication date? Publisher? Author bio? You have to go online and find the book on Amazon’s site to get any of that. And of course, you never get to see page numbers.
The selection is relatively limited. You can find something you’ll want to read, but unless it’s a current major title, you’re unlikely to find exactly what you want to read. (This might be less of a problem if most of what you read is for grown-ups, but I haven’t compared.)
I leaned on one corner and cracked the screen. It’s a lot less sturdy than it looks.
When I got my replacement, I could download all the things I had bought from Amazon, but the stuff I sent to my Kindle via my Amazon email address — NetGalleys, journal articles, other documents — were gone for good. Storage just isn’t that expensive; it seems like they could provide a cloud backup of all my content.
IPOD TOUCH: I’ve had this bit of tech for a year. It’s tiny, it’s light, the wifi works fine on the occasions when you are in a wifi zone, and typing with my thumbs on a touchscreen makes me want to give up on tiny & light and just encase it in a huge steampunk typewriter. So how was it when I had to rely on it?
Pros:
Audiobooks just downloaded from my library’s Overdrive, no problem. It is a rare occasion when technology that’s supposed to be seamless actually is, so I was impressed.
Put up with being thumbed by my dirty farmer hands and carried around in my pocket all day. In other words, sturdier than a Kindle.
Cons:
Overdrive has almost nothing available for iPods, despite their having major portable listening device market share. A good 80% of their audiobooks, I’d say, are Windows Media File only.
Overdrive crashes (on audio, at least) literally every 10 minutes. It’s a testament to a) how cheap I am and b) how fantastic the Jacky Faber audiobooks are that I kept listening anyway.
As soon as I connected to wifi, it chewed through the battery in an hour or two. Which was particularly annoying, since…
despite looking identical and fitting the plug, the wall charger I borrowed from a friend turned out to be for a different generation of iPod and therefore didn’t work. Poor design, Apple.
Dear Steve Jobs, Flash is still useful. Sometimes people like to watch videos on the internet. Love, me
PAPER: We all know the pros and cons, right? It doesn’t break or run out of batteries, but it’s heavier and bulkier and you can’t easily copy & paste it or send it to people or look stuff up on it. Additional discoveries:
Pros:
When I needed a particular book, it was not available as an e-book or audiobook. It was, however, available at the local independent bookstore (once I borrowed a car to get there).
I type faster than I write. But what you’re doing on a Kindle or iPod does not constitute typing. For anything longer than a few words — letters, notes, journaling — I was very grateful for the speed and simplicity of a pen on paper.
@Jake, wow! I’m amazed you had enough wifi to make all that workable. (And are there Touches with cameras? Mine didn’t have one, so I assumed that was an iPhone-only feature.)
I made it through two weeks of bumming around the islands in Thailand with only an iPod Touch.
Amazing particularly since I run a software business. And it worked really well, all told. Phone calls with Line2, Skype, e-mail, ebooks, music, taking pictures, work bits. Won’t replace a laptop, obviously, but quite the workable compromise.
Also, your About Me pic is cute.
@Matt, that’s interesting about the chargers! But this one is USB. Not sure what’s wrong with it…
@Greg, I hadn’t even thought of that. I can’t imagine anything classic enough for Anne (who came into being in 1908) to be quoting would still be in copyright, but I would believe Amazon was playing it safe — except that the Kindle format also cut her prayer the first night at the Cuthberts’, which she “wrote” herself. So I’m pretty sure Amazon just cut everything that was blockquoted.
In fact, I have yet to see any book — including more current ones with only one Amazon edition which I paid real money for — have any text formatting or layout. It can be very confusing to tell what’s quoted, for instance, when everything uses the same font and is justified the same.
GO GO COPPERFIELDS! I’m going there this weekend, I hope!
If Anne of Green Gables was quoting poems by other authors, it might conceivably be missing them due to idiotic copyright issues (even if Anne is out of copyright, it might not imply that about the poems or the publisher might just be playing it safe). I had this issue listening to the audiobook version of City of God by E.L. Doctorow. There’s a part where the book quotes a few lines of “Me and My Shadow”, and for the love of God the audio version actually states that the poem is omitted due to copyright. Why the hell should this be an issue with the audiobook when there’s not a problem in the book? Either the publisher has some lousy lawyers or fair use is even more convoluted than I ever thought imaginable.
The iPod charger may not have worked because of the connector on the charger side, rather than on the iPod side. If the wire to the charger has a FireWire connector, it will only work on really old (pre-2005 or so) iPods. If it has a USB connector, it should work on everything. The other thing to look out for is that iPod/iPhone chargers can’t necessarily charge an iPad, but iPad chargers can charge an iPod or iPhone. In case it ever comes up again.
Regarding Flash, you might have better luck contacting Tim Cook. It’s a new regime, and maybe they’re open to change. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Also, I’ve seen people travel with an iPhone and a Bluetooth keyboard so they can actually type, but it strikes me as pretty silly.