Published on December 31, 2011.
TweetBecause I enjoy reading and love technology, I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. So it has been 6 days and I can say: it is great; and that is the first reason I am writing a blog post about it. The second is because I want to put my feedback online, for people who would like another piece of information before buying it.
This blog post is not meant to be a detailed review of the Amazon Kindle: I only deal with some points which are import ant to me. Also I almost do not compare it with other ebook readers, because it has been done so many times and because I do not have enough knowledge of the other readers.
Being an Amazon product, it is obviously very well integrated with their store.
Some people say it is a major drawback: most of the books you buy through the Kindle store are “protected” using DRMs (yet it seems like you can easily deal with that issue, never tested that though), so you cannot do whatever you want with that. It is true, and I think we (readers) can all agree on the statement that they are hateful per se.
However, when you buy an e-reader, you have two choices on that point: either you buy an independent device (such as a Cybook by Bookeen) or a device sold by a bookseller. In my opinion, the point is: on the one hand, if you buy the device of a bookstore, you will be able to read the DRM-free books plus the protected books sold by the company. On the other hand, on a device created by an independent company, you will only be able to reader non-protected books. At the end of the day, I am not sure you win by buying an independent ebook reader.
Edit: This is what I thought. However, after a talk with @brunobord, I am now aware that independent readers can also read DRM-protected books. My question is now: why can’t my kindle? Actually, my only try with a non-Amazon DRM-protected book was with a document bought on iTunes. It may be an issue specific to iTunes DRMs. To be investigated.
Now there is the Choice: Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Barnes and Noble and so on. Which one? Well, I chooses Amazon because it is the place I usually buy my paper books, and they have a tremendous collection.
The pros and cons of the device itself have already been discussed in many places, and I think my visible enjoyment tells everything on my opinion on the topic.
Yet I was afraid it would not “feel right” in the hand while reading, because it is not as flexible as a paper book. However taking it in hand was really intuitive and it works well.
In addition to this I would like to signal that it is important to me to also buy a cover: the Kindle seems to feel dirty and scratched. It also just looks very nice.
When you register your Kindle online, Amazon creates you an @kindle.com email address. You can then send emails with documents attached (PDFs, Word’s DOC files etc), with an optional subject of “convert”. This process will both store the document on the Amazon website and send it to your device as soon as possible (i.e. when you turn on the Wi-Fi). To my mind it is incredibly powerful.
In fact, the first thing I did was to write a Python script to send a Kindle book (actually a MOBI file) built from a set of news feeds (RSS, atom). If you do not quite understand: it delivers the news every week or day directly to your kindle, for free.
People interested in this script, feel free to contact me if you have anything to say about it!
As you probably noticed, I am not a native English speaker. Actually I am French, which entails non-ASCII characters in almost every word. The problem is: the Kindle seems to default to ASCII encoding. On books you buy, it is obviously fine, but on self-made ones, you must be careful to specify the encoding (it has a perfect support for UTF-8).
This problem hit me two times. The first one, when I wrote the first version of DailyKindle. The second one is when I wanted to read a DRM-free book bought on iTunes. Here is the little trick I used to fix the problem:
The file was an EPUB, so basically just a ZIP file in disguise. After downloading Kindlegen (a must-have for any Kindle hacker), I ran the following commands in an OS X terminal:
unzip mybook.epub -d mybook
perl -e "s/<\/head>/<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=UTF-8\" \/><\/head>/g;" -pi $(find mybook/ -type f)
cd mybook && zip -rTv9 ../mybook2.epub * && cd ..
kindlegen mybook2.epub
There it is: I had a fully working MOBI file. I just had to send it to my Kindle email and I was ready to read.
This really irritated me: not defaulting to UTF-8 really is disgraceful.
This is a really nice object and I really enjoy it. As shown, it has downsides, but nothing one cannot deal with. I recommend it to any reader who is not resistant to technology (which is really understandable).