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By all accounts, between all the (HD)TV, bittorrented movies, blogs (ahem), and other media we consume today, we’re all spending fewer hours reading books and print than ever before. So why, then, is Amazon’s Kindle causing such a stir? Is the Kindle actually poised, as Jeff Bezos hopes, to take the humble book into the digital age? We can’t quite put our finger on it, but if Kindle’s launch feels at all to you like the act of reading has just turned a major corner, we’re on the same page. But things are still far from perfect. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading on the Kindle; click on for the review.

The hardware
We’ll save the Benjaminian critical-theory debate; we’re sure the classical critical theorists are already rolling in their graves — our degenerate culture has torn books from paper! We’ll be honest, we’ve no particular attachment to books-as-cultural artifacts, and have spent many a year waiting for the perfect e-book reader to come along. But any first generation product, especially those from a company that’s never made consumer electronics before, is bound to be fraught with issues. As many things as Amazon got right with its first piece of hardware, it seemed to get wrong — which bodes well for the “highly evolved” book.

If you’ve ever looked at an e-ink display before, you know what you’re in for. (If you haven’t, well, it does actually look a lot more like a piece of paper than any traditional display.) The Kindle uses the same 6-inch 600 x 800 e-ink Vizplex display as Sony’s latest reader, the PRS-505, although the devices are tuned slightly differently — the Kindle only has four shades of grayscale to the Sony’s eight. E-ink display can be tuned to refresh faster and have greater contrast with fewer shades of gray, but we didn’t notice much difference. Both devices have the same look of the slightly-grayish paper tone you’d find in your average paperback (although Sony’s display seemed a bit brighter); the text is dark and easily legible, although just like any book, without enough light you’ll strain your eyes. Yep, we’re already on hold for backlit e-ink.

While no one should be that surprised by the Kindle’s shape (since we did, after all, reveal Amazon’s plans for it way back in 2006), it wasn’t until launch that we got a good, long look at the thing. The iPod made white consumer electronics synonymous with friendly and fashionable, but the Kindle is at once symmetrical and amorphous, both angular and curved. Quite in fact, our biggest complaint with the hardware might be that the form factor is just simply too sculptural to be practical. The left edge of the Kindle is roughly twice as thick as the right, the screen slopes downward, then tapers off even thinner; the keyboard also slopes down at its own angle, as well. Hell, it’s ugly. There, we said it. Then again, an e-book reader doesn’t have to be beautiful. [Keep in mind, I wrote that stuff before Starck and the rest of the internets started bullying the thing for its ugliness. Still, it's true.]

To Amazon’s credit, the next / previous page buttons aren’t only the largest such buttons we’ve ever seen on an e-book reader, they may actually be the largest buttons we’ve ever seen on a device of this size, bar none. The next page button on the right is simply enormous, taking up 2/3rds of edge of the device. That’s really exciting in theory, but as we mentioned, that right edge tapers, making the next page button feel not only feel flimsy, but causing it to be triggered far too easily, especially if the book is resting on its side (should its owner be reading in bed, for example). The back button on the right side is also awkwardly placed, and doesn’t function as a previous page button. Amazon clearly over-thought the page forward / back buttons and went a little too far. You simply can’t grip the device (except but from the bottom, on the keyboard) without hitting a previous or next page button. Even with the screen locked it’s still horrendously irritating. Speaking of which, the screen locks after ten minutes without interaction. This is less to save power on the e-ink display (which only draws power during refreshes), and more because it’s impossible to pick the thing up without hitting a page forward/back button.

The scroll wheel is, however, by e-book interface standards, a work of art. Instead of those annoying static 0-9 buttons on the side or bottom of the display, the Kindle uses a dynamic negative white pneumatic-LCD to display a mirrored cursor of varying size which moves and rolls up and down the right side. (We would have traded the mirrored on white cursor for a white on black or black on white — but we’ll live.) The cursor interacts with text, menus, and serves as the primary tool of navigation. But there’s one thing you’ll inevitably catch yourself doing again and again: attempting to scroll through text. Of course, e-ink displays are far too slow to refresh to make computer-like scrolling feasible just yet (hence being stuck with next / previous page buttons). Hard to blame Amazon for that, but we have to wonder whether it would have been smarter to make the nav strip touch-sensitive instead of using the somewhat misleading wheel.

The keyboard is minimal and expertly done. The keys are very low-profile with exactly the right amount of clicky tactility, and have a playful, yet not at all distracting layout. There are few symbol keys, but no home-key ridges (which makes touch-typing is pretty much out of the question). While you won’t be using the keyboard too often, despite the surface space it consumes on the Kindle, you’ll be very glad it’s there. More on that in a minute.

The bottom and rear don’t feature much of interest: on the bottom, a 3.5mm jack for playing back music (MP3 and Audible) and a volume rocker, a USB port for accessing the 180MB user-accessible storage (yes, it also charges via USB!), a power jack, and a charge indicator; on the rear, a small speaker for playing back audio should you not have headphones plugged in, on / off switches for EV-DO and the device itself, and a rubberized back plate, which, when removed, reveals its user-replaceable 1530mAh battery and SD (not SDHC) slot. Under the hood of the Kindle is an Intel Xscale PXA255 400MHz CPU with 64MB of RAM running Linux 2.6.10. (Let the hacking begin.)

The system
Though e-book readers have been around in one form or another for years, as a device category they are still nascent, and to date Sony’s been the only company to put any real muscle behind their line. This, of course, means Amazon got to build its interface largely free from paradigms, which it did. Compared to the 0-9 hard button interface on the Sony Reader series, the Kindle’s penumatic-LCD scroll bar feels fresh and welcome. Menus aren’t by any means instant, but this is more to do with limitations of e-ink refresh rates, not the device or its snappiness.

Navigating the system is fairly simple: click on menu with the scroll wheel to access basic functions (go to Kindle store, go to cover, table of contents, add bookmark, add notes / marks, etc.); when reading, if you scroll up to a line and click it, the Kindle can display all the dictionary definitions of the words in that line (as well as add highlights and notes). The Kindle also has hard keys for commonly used nav, like a home key (to hit the home screen, duh), and possibly our favorite key, search, which displays entries not only from texts on your book (Kindle automatically indexes all the content it loads), it also gives quick links to search results in the dictionary, Wikipedia, on the web, and the Kindle store. As soon as you start using search you’ll realize what the killer e-book app really is. Any other future reader without built-in search simply won’t be taken seriously — if you want to talk about things that redefine the book reading experience, this is one of them.

Simple tasks like changing font sizes are extremely easy, but since an book that doesn’t have a fixed font size can’t use pages, it uses a series of dots on the bottom to display progress (which are also shown on the front display), and “locations” to display your exact spot in the book. Unfortunately, no one at Amazon could actually tell us what a “location” really is, besides a seemingly random sequential number on the bottom of the screen that doesn’t appear to correlate to anything in particular (like, say, paragraphs, sentences, lines, etc.). Bookmarking is automatic, but you can still easily dogear a page, as well as save lines or pages as text clippings. Removing content is also fairly easy — just hit the media manager, select what you’d like to move or remove, and you’re all set.

Whispernet: Fast service, decent prices, passable selection, but converting your texts to Kindle format is garbage and a cop-out instead of it just being able to read RTF, PDF, and other open document types. Also: the DRM is a bad joke and flies against the nature of books as mediums for sharing ideas.

Extra apps / easter eggs: Hooray! So. How long until they shut down the goodies that require internet access, like the browser, etc.?

One line wrap-up: A seriously flawed but totally original take on e-book readers — and our favorite to date.

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