{"id":13917,"date":"2011-11-30T09:39:10","date_gmt":"2011-11-30T17:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2011\/11\/30\/13917.html"},"modified":"2011-11-30T09:39:10","modified_gmt":"2011-11-30T17:39:10","slug":"my-first-kindle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2011\/11\/30\/my-first-kindle\/","title":{"rendered":"My first Kindle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The latest generation of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0051QVESA\/\">Kindle<\/a>&mdash;not the Kindle Fire, not the Kindle Touch, just the plain old Kindle&mdash;finally has the attributes I've been waiting for in an ebook reader:<\/p>\n<p>It has a big(ish) high-res(ish) screen, it's thin and light and inexpensive, and it fits into my pocket.<\/p>\n<p>So I bought one.<\/p>\n<p>On the plus side, it has all of the above attributes. The screen is gorgeous. I can hold the device comfortably in one hand, but the screen is much bigger than my iPhone screen. And of course I can read all of my Kindle books on it.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, it has some less-positive attributes as well. For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li>Every page turn starts with a sort of scrambling of the page's pixels that's really annoying. (Or, I guess another way to say this is that E&nbsp;Ink is still very slow to change the page contents.) This alone may make the device unusable for me; I don't want to be annoyed every time I turn a page while reading a book. But I may get used to it.<\/li>\n  <li>It has ads. There are fairly unobtrusive banner ads across the bottom of the home screen, and there are full-screen ads that appear when the Kindle sits idle. It took me quite a while to figure out how to dismiss the latter; turns out you press the Power button, 'cause none of the other buttons work while the full-screen ads are showing. It turns out you can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/remove-kindle-ads\/34594\/\">disable the ads<\/a> by paying an extra $30; if I keep the device, I'll definitely do this, 'cause the ads are really annoying. I'm not sure whether I would've bought this model if I'd really understood the ads thing.<\/li>\n  <li>It doesn't have a touchscreen. I could have paid $20 more and gotten a Kindle Touch, but (a) it's slightly bigger, so I wasn't sure it would quite fit in my pocket, and (b) I tried the demo model in the store and found it extremely slow to respond to touches, which was really frustrating. (And I couldn't figure out how to get to the home screen on the Touch.)<\/li>\n  <li>The contrast isn't high enough, even when there's plenty of light; it's dark-gray text on a light-gray background. The screen is lovely, but I'm partly color-blind, which tends to manifest as my having difficulty when there isn't much foreground\/background contrast. So far, I'm finding the text fairly readable when well-lit, but not as much so as I had hoped.<\/li>\n  <li>General slowness. It's not as slow to respond to input as the Touch seemed to be, but it's pretty slow.<\/li>\n  <li>Size. It's great that it fits in my pocket, but my ideal ebook reader would be just a little bit smaller. This is 6.5\" x 4.5\" x 0.34\"; reduce it to, say, 6\" x 4\" x 0.2\" (or even a little smaller) and it would be just about perfect for me. Funny&mdash;I've been saying for ages that I wanted an ebook reader to be the same width and height as an American mass-market paperback book, and this one almost is (slightly wider and shorter), but it still feels slightly unwieldy. And paperbacks are always an awkward fit in my pockets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anyway, I'm not sure whether I'll keep it or give it away. It's definitely pretty cool in some ways, but I'm not sure it's what I want.<\/p>\n<p>My ebook reading up &#8217;til now has been on my iPhone and my iPad. The iPad is a great reading experience (especially in iBooks), but it doesn't fit in my pocket. The iPhone is very portable (I take it with me pretty much everywhere), and I love the super-high-res Retina display; but the screen is physically smaller than would be ideal for ebook reading. If the rumored 4\"- or 4.5\"-diagonal iPhones do come to pass, that may be enough to assuage my desire for a better ebook reader. And the rumored 7\"-diagonal iPad might be perfect, if it doesn't have a big bezel. But for now, I'll carry the Kindle around for a while and see how I like it.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest generation of the Kindle&mdash;not the Kindle Fire, not the Kindle Touch, just the plain old Kindle&mdash;finally has the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,62,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-gadgets","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}