Kindle DX vs iPhone

Amazon has formally announced its "large format" Kindle DX, with pictures.

It's 9.75 display area (diagonally), using e-ink and sixteen shades of gray. It's designed primarily for the college textbook market, with newspaper readers as a secondary niche. The Kindle DX ships with 3.3 GB of memory, which, according to Amazon, is enough for storing up to 3,500 books, or more than double the storage of the Kindle 2, and it can auto-rotate to allow horizontal reading, just like the iPhone. The DX like the previous models uses Amazon's 3G-based Whispernet to download books; this is a cell-phone connection which means users don't need WiFi to connect to their online storage at Amazon. Amazon touts this as a virtue; users can re-download books whenever they want; this is a bit tricky in actual practice, of course. Amazon reserves the right to restrict or remove users' access to their Amazon online library of previously stored books, at any time. Should Amazon do that, users are limited to the books they current have stored on their Kindle or locally. The Kindle DX will be available from Amazon this June for $489, a mere $100.00 more than the Kindle 2.

Do I want one? No. Even though I'm a total gadget queen and e-book fanatic, I do not want this or any other Kindle. This is amusing. I started buying and loving e-books, and creating them, in 1989. I read them, hundreds of them, on my laptops. I bought two Palm PDAs, largely in order to read e-books. I read e-books on my iPhone. I've bought hundreds of ebooks. I've bought ebook versions of books I have in traditional codex printed format. And I do not want a Kindle.

Why? To start with, the Kindle is almost unbearably klunky in terms of UI. It's downright ugly. I love my iPhone's ability to navigate with a touch screen, which even my Palm does; the Kindle requires buttons, buttons by the way, that privilege the right-handed user. Also, I love the back-light on my iPhone. I don't like the DRM method the Kindle uses. I don't like the way the Kindle handles non-Kindle DRM .pdfs (they don't, basically). I don't like the Kindle's limitations on book file formats on the Kindle. I don't like e-ink, either. While I can live with sixteen shades of gray, I much prefer the text resolution of my iPhone; the text is sharper, clearer.

I don't want to carry another device for ebooks if it doesn't provide a much much better experience than the devices I'm already carrying. I'm already carrying my iPhone. The battery has never been an issue for me, by the way. I've read on my iPhone for back to back cross-country flights, used the phone, played music, and still had an hour left when I landed—without charging it again. (That said, it's pretty easy to find someplace even at an airport where I can charge for 20 minutes, and more than halfway "fill" my battery.)

But mostly my objection to the Kindle is that for that amount of money for a dedicated device (all the Kindle really does well is function as an ebook reader), I want more in an e-book, and in a reader. In order to explain that, I need to indulge in a little history lesson about e-books, and why I have the expectations I have.

Back in the dawn of the e-book, the Macintosh came with a free program from Apple called HyperCard. HyperCard is, to this day, my favorite piece of software, though it died with OS X. But a company called Voyager used HyperCard to make e-books, and multimedia e-books. Voyager produced and published conventional books, like this:

With text and images, and links to annotations. Voyager also produced multimedia e-books, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with a complete score and audio recording tied to the score and annotated, with commentary, essays, maps, and background information, all of it in hypertext. They also produced what is, still, to my mind, the best e-book ever: Macbeth. This was originally made with an entire video production of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth, linked to a completely annotated script. It has essays, glossaries, scholarly notes, maps, charts. This is still my model for what a digital book should be.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about DRM. I get, completely, why publishers use DRM or Digital Rights Management. It's a way to prevent books from being distributed and read by the person other than the one who purchased a book. I support that; I want authors, editors, and publishers to be paid. But DRM doesn't work. It's easily breakable all the time. Mostly, DRM just annoys the people who have legitimately paid for a book they can't read. I do like, very much, the way eReader's DRM works; they use my credit card number. If I'm OK sharing that, then I can share an e-book. I do think, however, that if I've purchased a book, I should be able to loan it to another reader. We need a way to "check out" a book temporarily, with an expiration date. It would sell more books.