Mad Atoms

Most of my day is spent in front of a screen. Even when I take a walk outside, I'll glance at my iPhone for emails, because I might have been sent an important Facebook message reminder in the 5 minutes since I left my apartment. Reading was one of the few activities I enjoy that doesn't involve a screen...

Until now?

There's a lot of "buzz" surrounding Amazon's Kindle, a portable eBook reader that would like to be the iPod for books. You can download eBooks into your Kindle and read them without having to carry around an rfBook (regular fucking book), plus multiple books can be stored in one device. Theoretically, a whole library of erotica can follow you around wherever you like to read and masturbate.

So, are they any good? Well, I don't think so, but I only got to try one out for 20 minutes. See, Amazon hasn't put the device in any "brick and mortar" stores for some reason, so you can't just go over to a Best Buy and try one out. Nor do they send free Kindles to bloggers, no matter how nice you are on the phone.

Instead, they host a forum where Kindle owners can meet-up with non-Kindlers to give them a demonstration.

Amazon relies on people buying a Kindle online and being nice enough to meet with complete strangers who won’t spend $350 on a device they’ve never held in their hands before. I mean, can’t they put up a Kiosk in the mall? I’m pretty sure Amazon is bigger than the "put your face on a t-shirt that says ‘Awesome Uncle!’" company.

Jesslyn from My Kindle Stuff was nice enough to meet me downtown for a Kindlegether (a Kindle-related get-together). The first thing I noticed about it was the Kindle operating system, which reminded me of the first generation Macs. Not just because it was black and white, but also because it looked kinda clunky.

You can change the text size, which is great for old folks, but you can’t change the sharpness or brightness of the screen. Reading for about 5 minutes, I got the same feeling I get when I read a lot of text off a screen: headache-y. Maybe it was because I was reading out in the sun, which can cause glare, but Amazon claims the screen "has the same appearance and readability of printed paper. Sharp and natural with no glare." I didn’t find that to be the case.

Another problem I had was the navigation.

I got seriously lost in the book and needed to go back a few pages, but there were no page numbers, only "location" numbers, which gives you the section of pages you’re on. So a screen will show "location 1092-1100" instead of "page 1095." A lot of eBooks also don’t have chapters, so if someone who read the rfBook says, "wasn’t chapter 8 amazing," your response will be, "wait, are you referring to location 1349q323-3423kd2&3?"

Don’t get me wrong—the Kindle has some cool features too. I like that it comes with built-in 3G and can download content from blogs. It was pretty light too, and the idea of being able to have lots of books at your beck and call is neat. However, I don’t see replacing my one completely screen-free leisure activity with the screen version, even if the screen uses "ink particles" or whatever. We’ve been cutting down trees for centuries to create books, and hopefully, we’ll be cutting down even more in the centuries to come.