I got my Kindle at the beginning of Christmas week. The holidays gave me a chance to show it to a number of friends and relatives who don’t read ebooks, don’t know about ebooks, and have never tried reading on a screen. Several of them had heard about the Kindle and were primed to see how it worked. And none of them had heard of the Sony Reader, nor would they have ever considered reading a book on a PDA or a Blackberry.

I’m pretty sure my demos sold three Kindles this weekend. I am more convinced than ever that the overall value proposition here — easy connectivity and the fast and direct acquisition of many of the books it would occur to people to want — will create success despite the real flaws in the product design.

I made the leap long ago to reading books on a hand-held device, currently a Palm Pilot. The always-with-me aspect combined with the back-lit screen for reading in bed in a dark room created book-reading opportunities no paper book could fill. And I learned to like the small page and short line width; I have come to notice when reading something forces my eyes to move and to have to work to find the beginning of each new line on the left. Doesn’t happen on the Palm. Or the Kindle.

For straight narrative reading, there are two serious disadvantages to the Palm, both solved by the Kindle. One is the purchasing and loading experience, which for the Palm is time-consuming and often frustrating. You shop either at Powells.com, which isn’t bad, or EReader.com, which is atrocious. Then you download to your computer, open the file, and load it to your Palm by hot-synching it. Failures can occur at every step. The other issue is the battery life. I can only read the Palm for a couple of hours before it starts needing juice. And I have other things I need the Palm to be functional for. So it isn’t a good tool to provide airplane reading for a trans-Atlantic flight.

The Kindle gadget itself is actually pretty seriously flawed. You have to get used to holding it while you read in a way that avoids inadvertent page advances. The “cursor” and selection wheel is limiting and, consequently navigation is over-involved. If using the iPod and iTunes defines elegant, using the Kindle and Amazon through it defines clunky. And yet…

Once you get used to keeping your fingers off the page-turning bars, reading on it is just fine. I hate right-justified lines, which it’s got (and why no way to choose out of it?), but the page width and depth are very paperback book-like. I’m fine with the default type size, but changing it to a larger (or smaller) one is two clicks. It’s lighter to hold than a book and advancing through pages is no harder or more distracting than with a paper book. Halftones and line drawings are okay — not great. I have a feeling, as I’m reading it, that I’m missing a lot of visual elements in the Stephen Colbert book. Like maybe they just left them out of the Kindle version. But I don’t read that many books that have visual elements.

It is solving my two prior ebook complaints: ease of title acquisition and battery life. And it is adding something fabulous: Amazon offers quick-loading samples of every book that are free. What you get in the sample, which you have about ten seconds after you click for it, seems to be all the front matter and a chapter or two. In an otherwise busy week, I’ve downloaded about ten samples, bought two books (and read big chunks of both of them) I’ve only had the device for ten days, but it looks to me like I will actively be reading two different books on devices from now on: one on my Kindle and one on my Palm. Which I’m reading at any time will be a function of circumstances and, of course, the urgency of reading the next chunk of one book or the other. The Palm is in my pocket all the time; the Kindle will travel in my laptop case and be with me at home, at the office, and in my hotel room and in transit when I’m travelling.

When I show people the device, they’re intrigued. When I show them the reading experience, they’re satisfied and accepting. But when I show them the buying procedures, they’re entranced. Amazon’s core competence ain’t devices, but they sure know how to maximize the shopping experience.

As you’ve read elsewhere, the Kindle takes you quickly and directly to Amazon, where you shop selections (bestsellers or new and noteworthy) or search the site in the normal way. Then you get the full Amazon data set, including those reviews they have. And you are offered an opportunity to buy or download the sample with a click.

I didn’t know the price of either of the two books I have bought when I bought them, so quick and seductive is the purchase button. And, of course, I was “sold” because I had, in both cases, read the sample. But I was pleasantly surprised. Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth”, for which the new paperback costs $11.99 at Amazon, and the cheapest used copy is $11.05, was $6.39 for my Kindle edition. And Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America (And So Can You)”, a current hardcover bestseller for which the publisher’s list is $26.99, the new book is $16.19 at Amazon and the cheapest used copy is $12.48, was $9.99 for my Kindle edition. Based on this very limited sample, savings (over Amazon prices) are $2-5 per book. If that holds up, it would take 100 or so books to repay the $399 (current) cost of the device (assuming one didn’t plan to re-sell the print editions after reading them.)

I have seen Jeff Bezos quoted to the effect that ebooks should be cheaper because you can’t pass them around like printed books. On that basis, the price comparison above might not be accurate. But one of the people I showed the Kindle to, who travels a lot and reads lots of books and who does not re-sell her printed editions, did the arithmetic for herself about the same way I did above.

And the Kindle does more than deliver you cheaper books; it also, in a way most people wouldn’t use a lot but which can certainly be helpful from time to time, delivers the Internet.

The dynamic the book business needs to wrap its collective brain around is that the more straight text narrative books you read, the more useful Kindle is and, on balance, the less it costs. And once you have a Kindle, it will take some real reason to make you buy a book of that kind another way. This is fraught with implications, which will be the topic of another post.

Posted: 01|1|08 at 7:52 pm. Filed under: Bookstores, Digital Libraries, eBooks, eReaders, Publishing, Reading, Retailing, The Book. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Comments and pings are currently closed.