Almost two years to the day after the Amazon Kindle was first released in the U.S., the wildly popular e-reader is now finally available to Canadians. Question is, was it worth the wait?
I’ve been fiddling with a Kindle for the past few days, and while it’s a slick little device, it still has some limitations that irk me. To be fair, I’m really not the target consumer for e-readers in general – I don’t read a ton of books in a year, and when I do I generally read them one at a time, at home. For folks like me, the Kindle (and the Sony Reader, which I wrote about recently) doesn’t really make sense.
But for people who read a lot, have long daily commutes, travel frequently or just think it would be cool to have their entire book collection on a single device, the Kindle ($259 US plus shipping, from Amazon.com) does have appeal. It’s slim and light, it can hold as many as 1,500 books (which cost about $12 a pop, much cheaper than new release hardcover prices) and the display is relatively easy on the eyes. Given a choice I’d still much prefer to flip through a paper book – navigating menus and turning pages with the Kindle feels a bit sluggish to me – but you can’t argue with its portability and convenience.
The Kindle’s main advantage over competing products like the Sony Reader is that can users can browse, buy and download books from Amazon via the device itself, as it uses mobile data technology similar to what you’d find in a cellphone. (Amazon hasn’t revealed which Canadian wireless carrier they’ve partnered with, but a quick look at the Kindle’s wireless coverage map makes it pretty clear they’re running on the Rogers network.) Roughly 300,000 titles from the 360,000 in the Amazon Kindle store are available to Canadians, and once you link your Kindle to your Amazon.ca account, it’s very quick and simple to buy and download books. (The downside of this is the Kindle isn’t compatible with other online bookstores.)
While it’s definitely a cool feature, I found the selection in Amazon’s Kindle Store to be oddly lacking, especially when compared to Sony’s eBook Store. Maybe I have weird taste in fiction, but several authors found in Sony’s store were either underrepresented or missing entirely from the Kindle store. For example, the Sony eBook Store has five Douglas Coupland novels for sale, including his latest, Generation A. The Kindle store only has 2006’s JPod, which strikes me as odd.
Another thing that bugs me about the Kindle is its availability, or lack thereof. It can only be ordered from Amazon.com in the U.S. for delivery to Canada, which means you’re paying in American dollars and shelling out for cross-border shipping and any related duty charges. As well, there are features in the American version of the Kindle that aren’t available to Canadians, like the ability to e-mail PDF and Microsoft Word documents to Amazon and have them sent back to you in a format that can be read by the Kindle. Canadians also can’t take advantage of the Kindle’s built-in Web browser; we’re limited to access to the Kindle Store, Wikipedia and that’s it. I can’t understand why, but there it is.
Although I didn’t care much for the Sony Reader when I reviewed it, using the Kindle made me go back and look at the Reader with fresh eyes. Sony’s product lacks the built-in keyboard and wireless functionality of the Kindle (although wireless data is coming in the next generation of Reader), and it’s not as svelte or pretty, but overall the Sony Reader is a more flexible and full-featured device, allowing users to access content from a much wider variety of sources and offering what seems to me to be a more robust selection of books from its own online store. Another option is to skip the e-reader entirely and buy e-books from Shortcovers.com to read on your existing mobile device, like a BlackBerry or netbook computer.
But again, I don’t quite see the attraction of e-readers. I like my gadgets to serve multiple purposes, and a $300 gizmo that can only read electronic books feels almost backwards to me. Give me a full-colour touchscreen, fully functional Web browser, a bunch of different apps and all kinds of multimedia capabilites, and then we’ll talk. So I guess that means I’m waiting for the Apple Tablet…