Amazon’s New Kindle Is Best Book Reader Available: Seth Porges

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- When it was released in late 2007, Amazon.com Inc.’s original Kindle electronic book reader turned a lot of heads and, eventually, a whole lot of pages. The much- loved product redefined ebook readers, and was perpetually out of stock.

So what kind of revolutionary new product did Amazon produce as a follow-up? One that looks a lot like the first Kindle. The Kindle 2 is certainly a sleeker and faster version of the original device, but all in all, not much different.

A little background: The Kindle wasn’t the first ebook reader to feature an Eink screen (which uses tiny shape-shifting ink-like capsules to produce print-quality text without any of the eye strain of LCD screens). But it became a breakthrough product because its high-speed wireless connection (from Sprint Nextel Corp.) allowed users to quickly download new books directly to their device from anywhere in the U.S., without paying extra.

The original Kindle had its share of flaws, and they have only grown more noticeable and frustrating during the year users have had to play with their toys.

The worst offense: The product felt like it had been designed to be read in a library or laboratory. In real life, users would be grabbing it at odd angles while being bumped around in subway cars and in the seats of cars. Merely grabbing the side of the Kindle without an almost-surgical level of care was often enough to cause accidental button presses and page skips.

Refinement

So the new Kindle 2 is less of a revolution, and more of a refinement. All that was good about the original Kindle is still here. Its screen is easy on the eyes, it’s extremely easy to download new books over the device’s built-in 3G cellular network, and it uses barely more battery life than a paper book. (Amazon promises, and delivers, weeks of reading time between charges, allowing travelers to leave their charger at home.)

Most of the changes are aesthetic. Buttons are now accident-proof (because they need to be pushed inwards, grabbing the side doesn’t trigger them), it’s thinner (at 0.36 inch, it’s about half as thick as its predecessor, and thinner than any gadget I’ve held), has more built-in memory (now up to 2 gigabyte, but there’s no longer an SD card slot), and the original’s awkward navigation wheel has been replaced by a joystick-like button, which makes it easier to scroll in any direction.

The screen is also improved, and now sports 16 shades of gray compared with the original’s four. However, users are unlikely to notice much difference unless they use its barebones browser to surf graphics-heavy Web sites.

No Touchscreen

What the Kindle 2 doesn’t do is include a ton of flashy new features. There’s no color screen, no radical redesign, and, unlike Sony Corp.’s new PRS-700 Reader, there’s no touchscreen or built-in reading light. There’s also no roaming outside the U.S. with the wireless connection. Amazon spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal declined to comment on whether the company plans to make roaming available in the future.

While this cautious approach can be frustrating for tech- addicted early adopters, it is probably a smart move for a product such as this, which aims at the mass market. After all, the Sony’s touchscreen serves little purpose, and color Eink technology is still a long way from being ready for consumers.

Among the Kindle’s few actual new features, some users might enjoy the improved built-in dictionary, which now displays the definition of any word unobtrusively on the bottom of the screen.

Robotic Voice

Then there’s the text-to-speech functionality, which allows the device to “read” any book out loud to you (via the headphone jack or built-in stereo speakers) like an ad hoc audiobook. This is probably Kindle 2’s most talked-about new feature, but it’s also the one you’re likely to use the least.

This feature actually had authors’ groups threatening legal action, claiming it would discourage people from buying audiobooks. Amazon said last week it was changing the Kindle to let publishers control whether a book can be read aloud.

The writers have little to fear -- it’s impossible to imagine the robotic, unemotive, GPS-like voice putting real human voice actors out of business any time soon. As an experiment, I tested how long I could listen to a Kindle-read book before it became unbearable. I lasted less than five minutes.

Overall, the new Kindle is certainly the best ebook reader on the market. The only real competition out there is the Sony Reader, but the top-end model’s $399 price tag is $30 more than the new Kindle’s, and it doesn’t have the Kindle’s best feature: wireless access.

So if you have the original Kindle should you toss it and pick up the new one? No way. But if you’re thinking of taking your first steps into e-books, this is as good an entry point as you’ll find. And it doesn’t hurt that its price tag is $30 less than the original Kindle’s was when it launched.

Amazon Kindle 2
$369 from www.amazon.com. Books cost about $10 each.
Rating: 8/10

*T   (Seth Porges is an editor for Popular Mechanics and a
columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his
own.)

To contact the writer of this column:
Seth Porges at seth.c.porges@gmail.com