Finally got a Kindle. So: no more looking around at the entire 'net, trying to guess who's lying about what this thing does and doesn't do. Also: reviewtime.

I guess I'll start with the downsides, since they're my bigger issue.

First: technically, I didn't get a Kindle. Hunter's amazon.com account has AmazonPrime, which gets her free 2Day shipping on anything she buys directly from the company [of course, it doesn't apply to thirdparty stuff, which is what I end up getting personally, most of the time], so she went in and grabbed a Kindle2 on her account. For that, the thing showed up here yesterday, already turned on, complete with a customised Hello Hunter EBooklet.

That shouldn't be a big deal. Except that her account otherwise has about one book in it, to date; and, as it happens, I wrote that. More on that in a minute....

So. In my account, I've got a couple hundred books lurking on amazon.com's servers. From newish stuff released this year to PD classics like Dracula and Frankenstein and The Time Machine. None of it's on her Kindle, because none of it's on her account. I did get halfway toward deregistering her Kindle and adding it to my account; but, once the thing was functionally bricked, we backed up and reconnected it to her, wondering how many times amazon.com would really let us trade the device back and forth before working out that we were kinda cheating the system.

About the one book in her account: that's LK0. And that was good and bad.

I read through it, word for word, on an actual Kindle. That was helpful. In fact, it was critical. That falls under Good Things. I caught about three dozen independent mistakes—mostly in coding—and, because the Kindle allows for highlighting, marked each along the way before opening the list of highlights and going through fixing each in WordPad. As of now, so far as I know, while I'm back to seeing Publishing 97D [LK0]. Your content is being published. Most titles take between 24 to 36 hours to become buyable. (why?), the book is fixed; I deleted my preview and got a new one, and the mistakes I fixed last night are gone from at least the first four chapters the preview displays.

Of course, there's still that problem with replacing a given book. It looks like, in order to get an unflawed copy, I [or she] would have to go into the account on amazon.com itself, delete LK0 completely, then buy a new copy. Which isn't a big deal: it's a dollar, of which I get a thirty-five-cent kickback anyway; but it's annoying. I'd be a lot happier if a revision to a KindleBook maybe triggered an EMail letting us know that a newer version was available, possibly even illustrating the nature of the revision, and giving us the option of downloading an update. Rumour, however pointlessly, has it that this'll probably become an option sometime in the future.

Most people gushing over the Kindle are thrilled about the screen. Because it's more like paper than like a computer screen. Personally, I can't be too impressed. I'm not denying that it's paperish and readable; but it's not news, to me. To me, it looks and functions just about exactly like any HewlettPackard palmtop screen from the nineties. It really reminds me of the HP200LX, though it's larger. It's kinda like the HP320LX in even more ways.

Meaning, in part, that it's not black and white. It's grey and grey. Not just to me. The background looks to me more like manilla than paper; for reference, get a shot of a cardboard folder in black&white, I guess. It probably cuts down on eyestrain, being that dark; but it also cuts down on contrast. It's easy enough to read; it just convinces you that there's never enough light in the room. I guess, to the extent that it's just like paper, it's more like a book stamped onto massmarketed pulp than a crisp, creamy hardcover. So an image on a given page, for example, can be a little too dark to see very well.

The batterylife is good, but not exceptional. Granted, I was pushing the thing pretty hard, seeing what it would do. But its ability to show up, already turned on, with half its battery left is only possible when it's merely turned on, not when it's turned on and doing anything at all.

And, the really funny part. I wanted a Kindle so I could playtest books before uploading them. That doesn't really work all that well.

First of all: I connected the thing to this computer, and spent the next hour trying to do anything more than simply recharge it. That might be more my fault than the Kindle's, of course. When it showed up, and never for long, it tried to be the F: drive. Usually, F: is one of my cardreader slots. So, probably, my system was trying to work out what I thought I was trying to use F: for. I did eventually trip across a simple solution: turn Kindle completely off, but without actually restarting it; connect USB to computer; connect USB to Kindle; Kindle turns itself on, just as computer sees that it's Drive F:, allowing access to the folders within.

The problem now is that, access granted, I wanna throw a book I'm coding onto the thing, to test it out. And that's not gonna happen. I mean, I can do it; it's just not remotely helpful.

The Kindle can read a number of formats. Technically, this is a good thing. In my case, it's a bad thing. Because I can give it hypertext or PDF or even .prc. But .prc isn't quite the same as .azw, which is what the KindleStore actually sells. So there are differences in the coding. I'm not sure how many differences there are. But a huge one is indentation. With .azw, I can pull a CSSbacked <P CLASS="noind"> to prevent indentation; in .prc, the CSS is ignored. I could probably cheat my way through that, using a codeword in the .prc: NOINDIt was a dark and stormy night, to FindReplace with the .azwfriendly coding later; but it doesn't seem like I should really have to.

Also—and this is funny—one of the things I was lied to about was that the Wintel emulator couldn't import these things. Which is technically true. Except that, once I've compiled the hypertext to .prc to playtest it on a real Kindle, doubleclicking it happens to open it into the emulator, which happens to work just fine...apart from the differences, again, between .prc and .azw, which aren't any less problematic on the actual device. So: who knew.

I think that's most of the bad news. Here's why, now that this Kindle is all married to Hunter, I'm about to go grab my own....

As for playtesting books to catch mistakes, that's nothing new. Historically, I've been known to have a prototype printed up, just so I can go sit at a restaurant somewhere with a proverbial bluepencil, reading word for word and noting things to fix. And those prototypes are way more than a dollar per copy; also, they take weeks to be printed and shipped to me. With a Kindle, I can upload what might be roughly ready, wait what might be a matter of hours [the '24 to 36' is an estimate of how long it'll be before I can upload another revision; usually, the thing's actually available far sooner than that], grab an enduser copy for a dollar [paying myself thirty-five percent], lurk at a restaurant without even a pencil, and highlight mistakes to fix when I get back here, in the event that I didn't bring a laptop with the hypertext source itself. And that rocks. I've got inprogress copies of Paroxysm sitting on my shelf here, incomplete and marked up with things to correct from 2004. If I coulda done that on a Kindle: A) it woulda been faster and cheaper and easier and B) it woulda been less necessarily since the book coulda been fifteen hundred pages after all.

There is the one trick. If I upload a Work in Progress, the thing's technically available to anyone, and for a dollar. And, as lamented, revsions to that version won't replace anything anyone's bought. So there's a slight danger that people'll leap in and grab my editing copy, getting something which might be a little unreadable. On the bright side, I've already got a plan for that; it's like this: LK0 being done [I think, anyway], and 99¢, that one's safe; anything else going for $0.99 is technically in beta; if you wanna be certain that you've got the final edition, wait for it to be $7.99; that'll be my little hint that I'm [probably] done fucking around with it.

Of course, on the bright side, if you grab a copy of a book for a dollar, it'll probably just have a couple of meaningless coding errors. Maybe the occasional typo. But the book in general should all be there. So it's probably not a big deal, to most people.

Other reasons I wanted a Kindle. Which turned out to be true.

A good way to kill its battery in a hurry [and, even then, it'll outlast that of any laptop, including the newer Macs] is to use the Kindle for everything it can do, all at once. And here's what it can do....

It does of course read books aloud to you. Not well; it kinda sounds like the computer trying to kill you in Portal with a hangover; but it'll do it. Incidentally, if you're looking for a typo, that'll find it: Hunter's copy of LK0 curiously had the word restauruant [sic] toward the beginning; the text2speechware read it as it was written—rest-a-ru-ant—making it impossible to miss.

Something I guess I haven't tested is whether it'll read .prc files aloud. I should try that.

T2S kills batteries, of course. So does playing songs. You can get into the filesystem [once the computer agrees that it exists] and dump an .mp3 or fifty into the music folder already waiting on the device, then launch them with AltSpace. It's a little slow and choppy; I'm better off with my PSP or my phone, and I'd be better off than that with an actual iPod; but it's there, and it's sorta cool.

Also, as rumoured, the Kindle very much hits wikipedia.org. And google.com. And in fact any site I send it to. It's slow [reminding me again of hooking the HP320LX to the 'net through a PCMCIA 56k cardmodem and a phoneline], and it can't handle anything resembling Flash, and it's not thrilled about images in general, and it keeps every site you hit per session in RAM, killing the battery and eventually locking the hell up. But it does work:

So that works out nicely. Not only can I in fact hit wikipedia.org to look things up from anywhere, with or without WiFi: I can follow the sources to be sure what I'm seeing is true. And, of course, I can do anything but my job by hanging out at m.twitter.com and m.facebook.com all night. Though, also, m.wund.com, and whatever.

Really, I just killed any need to have a dataplan on my smartphone. And, since I'm likely to be writing the book in question into the smartphone, that's good news: I can do what I'm doing, watch for useful information online through the Kindle, and actually get something done. At least until I'm arrested for killing some drunk imbecile for asking whether the Kindle's a computer.

A problem I've heard from people about the Kindle is that it's all light and fragile. Maybe; I dunno. But, at about the same time, I hear that it's too heavy. I don't get that at all. A couple days ago, I was sitting at Starbucks for a couple hours, reading an ancient paperback copy of Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency I'd found on the floor. And that's funny, partly because its coverprice is US$4.50. Also, it's not a long book, and certainly not a hardcover. Still, after a couple hours, my metacarpels were screaming about holding the thing open to read through it.

The Kindle, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. I can hold that thing for hours; then I can switch hands; then, in fact, I can set it down without fearing that it'll close up on me. It's lighter than a shortish paperback. Almost like a magazine, except that it doesn't sway about, adding weight through inertia. Maybe it's just that, while the Kindle weighs a little more than my phone, I'm still kinda used to mobilephones outweighing landlines. So, if the Kindle's too heavy to use, then it's not the Kindle's fault: it's that you're really weak, and you have an EnterKey. Get over it.

I do kinda like the manipulation controls, as much as I assumed I wouldn't. This is the Kindle2, not the DX, so it's not gravityfed. And that's good. So, in the same menu allowing a book to be read aloud, the fontsize can be changed, and the screen can be rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees. It takes a few clicks, and the device pauses to think about what it's being told; but there are uses for the options. Also, in tilting the screen, the use of the joystick tilts with it. If you've ever tested your videocard by tilting the contents of your screen by ninety degrees, or even just tried holding a netbook sideways, you know how annoying it is to have to think all sideways like that; the Kindle does that for you: up is always up, no matter where the logo is. And that's cool.

So. That's about that. Overall, I'm pretty happy with this thing. There's room for improvement, and there'll be improvements in later versions. I probably wouldn't really need a second battery [unless the one buried in the thing wears out], since the thing will last a week through normal use, and recharge in a couple hours—maybe six, if you're using it at the same time. Adding MicroSD wouldn't suck, since a gig of storage sounds painfully small for a device capable of spoofing an iPod; but that's all incidental since I've got all these other things I can stash music onto. I could complain that there's no way to write a book on the Kindle; but, since the keyboard kinda sucks anyway, and I've got a phone for that, I just don't care. The thing works just about well enough to hit m.twitter.com and post something pithy from anywhere in the world [and for free, from anywhere in the nation], which is more than I'd wanted it to do in the first place.

I don't really have a ratings system here, especially for something I had to buy before testing, and three years after its release. So: it's better than bad; it's good.

More later....