Review: Amazon Kindle 2.0 now selling at $189

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

You can thank the iPad, and the Barnes and Noble Nook, and the Sony Reader....heck, even the Kobo Reader. All that competition has shaken and stirred Amazon to reduce the price of their Kindle 2 ebook reader to a sensible US $189.00 (it originally cost Canadians $312 plus import taxes late last year!)

 

The Amazon Kindle is now an even more attractive and affordable option available to Canadians. It's an "iPod for your books," a portable device that carries digital books, magazine and newspapers. The convenience and economical implications of such a device have always been, intriguing, revolutionary, staggering. Amazon's selection of books is unparalleled and you just can't beat free over-the-air delivery and online purchasing. 

eBook readers in general seem to hold the answer to a lot of problems. Fewer trees sacrificed at the alter of consumer products, less money required to print, transport and store inventory, updates to from the original to the latest editions in minutes, and so on. It just makes sense in this digital age - especially for the constantly updated likes of textbooks, periodicals and newspapers.

To recap the Kindle's well documented capabilities, it uses greyscale E-Ink technology to approximates copy on a page. Moreover, the device doesn't just have the ability to display text and images, it also allows for bookmarking, highlighting and clipping of specific parts of text.

Whispernet is Amazon's wireless data service that manages the unlimited Internet access (via 3G, no less), allowing Kindle owners to search for books and purchase them instantaneously. This is really the Kindle's most valuable advantage over competing eBook readers that may have similar features but require an internet connected PC to make actual purchases.

All told, with the Kindle, you are never without a good book to read. If you see something in the airport bookstore that catches your fancy, you can have it on your device before the plane takes off, adding no weight to your baggage and spending considerably less than the kiosk owner was hoping you'd pay. Similarly, you can also purchase books wirelessly when traveling to any of number the 100 countries where Kindle is sold.

With 300,000 books available to Canadian Kindle owners, plus subscriptions to select newspapers and magazine readily available - even before hardcopies hit newsstands - the Kindle is extremely compelling not just for book lovers but news junkies, too. Well, to a point. See below.

Out of the box, the Kindle offers a superior reading experience. First off, there are six font size settings to choose from. Alternately, the thing will read to you aloud in a robotic but very capable text-to-speech voice.

In the testing environment, tight integration with Amazon made it possible to buy books online even before the device arrived. These pre-ordered books transferred quickly as soon as the Kindle powered on and established its 3G connection.

Similarly, the process of buying books from the device itself is frightfully fast and easy. Find a book you only think you might like and you have the option of checking out an excerpt first, but if you've already made the purchase decision, it takes but one-click. That is to say, Amazon does not even give you the usual "are you sure you want to buy this book?" warning/confirmation; it just completes the transaction, taking your money and downloading the book to your device straight away.

Impulse buyers beware, there is no way of returning books already sent to your device.

Also note that the Canadian Kindle experience is somewhat hobbled. The device itself is sold via Amazon.com, the US online store, for about US$312 after exchange, shipping and handling fees, but it arrives with a number of significant features disabled.

The US version allows you unlimited Internet access, for example. While web surfing on the Kindle is not ideal, it certainly helpful and nice to have in a pinch. In Canada, you can only surf Wikipedia and the Amazon bookstore. That's it.

A subscription to Newsweek or Time Magazine, meanwhile, nets you the text but not the images. Since half of the experience of reading magazines is in the intriguing photos accompanying any given story, it's a shame that these are left out (likely due to royalty and copyright considerations), more so considering you pay the same full price as the photo rich versions.

And finally, Canadian Kindle users cannot subscribe to blogs or RSS feeds, which is likewise ridiculous considering the Kindle is the ideal device for reading this type of free, plain, real-time and widely available content.

So yes, the Kindle is cool and handy and probably a precursor to the future of the written word. But if you're Canadian, it's only an emasculated version of the real deal. If you love everything about books except the weight and the dog ears, Kindle is great. But if you love reading more than just books and have a penchant for technology that can deliver the lot of it, not so much with the great.